STUCK

“We’re stuck,” he said, “stuck in our ways, stuck in our inability to provide a wider vision of what our service to the organization and our customers could and should be.”
Now that was a brief I could work with. We took the team to an extremely remote shooting lodge. To get there, 4x4s were needed. They hired theirs. We took ours. After an apparently normal dinner, overnight stay and breakfast, unfortunately our clumsiest consultant got the 4x4 stuck to its axles in a notorious bog, just off one end of the landrover track. Why did he ever go in there?
The call for help came in at the shooting lodge, and it was all hands to the pump, or, in this case, shovels, tow ropes, winches etc. For a good few hours, the team laboured to release the vehicle. They were up to their knees, and sometimes deeper in the mud, struggling to get the vehicle out, oblivious to the metaphor being worked on them.
But in session afterwards, receiving feedback from the rest of the business on being “stuck in the mud” as a team, together with video and observational feedback of their physical labours led them to reflect on their own behaviours at their best and at their worst.
To this day, the client says he cannot work out whether we deliberately got that vehicle stuck, or not! There was a sequel.
One group member, who had spent a childhood in the countryside, said “you won’t get that out. You need a tractor.” He was right. But the group didn’t see it that way. They saw their mission as trying to get the thing out, as distinct from getting it out. That he would not join in what he saw as futile labours left him isolated. Some months later. I revisited the team, more cohesive than ever. The lone voice was no longer employed within it.