The Power of Nature: The Underrated Impact of Wilderness Learning

I have just returned from a 5 day leadership program for an incredible organisation called CareerTrackers. They were established to support young indigenous Australians to enter university and then move onto into positions within target companies who have signed up to their visionary model of addressing the great divide between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

The program was set up and managed by Outward Bound Australia and I was invited back to my old stomping ground to run the course with a younger instructor who just hadn’t had enough corporate program experience to run it on her own.

It’s always strange going back to somewhere that defined a unique period of your life and it was somewhat surreal to drop back into an old workplace that I had lived and breathed for almost 6 years way back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Those 6 years were the most formative of any period of my life (second only to building a family). Days and often weeks in the wilderness with groups hiking with a pack on my back, camp fires, rain, stars, abseiling, rafting, climbing mountains and grovelling underground in caves. For anyone with an outdoor education background that will all make sense – but to explain the power of outdoor programs to someone who has never done it is always difficult.

There are common misperceptions that get in the way. Hazy notions of cheesy 1980’s corporate team building events in the bush. Maybe a bad memory of a terribly facilitated outdoor initiative squashed into the program at a 5-star resort during a sales conference where the team is led through a debrief about this new idea called forming, storming, norming and performing. Maybe a ropes course activity instructed and led by a well-meaning outdoor educator who has only led young schools groups and makes the embarrassing mistake of treating adults like they are children.

What many people don’t or have never seen is when it is done with meticulous planning, smart insight about the desired outcomes and a deep authenticity about the whole experience and what relevance it has back in the workplace.

So I stood in a circle at the end of this program, a symbolic fire burning next to me, the mountains in the background – as people stepped forward to share their future story and I was reminded of why I did this, why I agreed to leave my young daughters for 7 days and just how damn amazing this form of learning is.

A lot has been researched and written about experiential and outdoor learning but this is just a few of the personal reflections I had as I flew home just last night.

1: There is no substitute for nature.

No matter how many “living walls” and wilderness screen savers you have in the office there is nothing that can replace the power of being immersed in nature. I don’t mean a short stroll on a track – but sweaty, off track, crawling through eucalyptus forests, sleeping under the stars, smoke in the hair, standing-on-rocky-outcrops-at-sunset nature. It is raw and deeply spiritual and no matter how much or little experience you’ve had in nature, stepping into it taps into that primal part of your brain that evolved to BE in nature. Our brains were not designed to be in the built environment. Henry Thoreau called it “elemental” – stripped back to raw elements without the complexity of our modern world. It is simple, uncomplicated, immediate and most importantly bigger than us. In our shiny corporate worlds we can sometimes get the god-like delusion that we are in control of everything. Nature reminds us that we are not. If rain wants to come – it will come. The sun will go down, it will get cold. You can’t change it – all you can do is adapt and respond as best you can.

2: Wilderness disrupts

We’ve all experienced it. That leadership development program where there is a significant proportion of the room or the team who just check out. They do the activities, they say the right things, they make the action lists, they talk about intentions…..and go back to work and do everything as they used to. If you choose to it is easy to glide through a day or two in a room. You can’t glide through 3 or 5 days in the bush. At some point you will need to engage. At some point your buttons get pushed or – even against your stoic resistance – you get inspired. It is possible to disrupt a group within 4 walls – but it often takes force and with the use of force it can seem like the facilitator is the instigator not the group. The beauty of nature is that you can let it creep in – making the disruption all the more powerful and personal for that individual. They own it. They are drawn to the learning and insight rather than being pushed.

3: Wilderness inspires

There was a moment that brought me to tears in this last program. We were standing in the pre-dawn darkness, packs ready for the day long activity of a multi-pitch abseil descent into the valley below us. The red dawn sun was lighting up the mackerel sky (that fish-scale like cloud formation you sometimes see). We stood in silence as one of the indigenous participants read an indigenous poem about moving through country and noticing how it all connected, flowed and worked and how important it was that stories of country were passed down to the next generations. He read it with his life and in that moment it was the most beautiful thing on earth.

That’s hard to get in a room.

4: Wilderness creates space for reflection

We all know what the modern corporate workday is like. It is full and fast. It is constant stimulation and demands to process information. It is about constant connection and immersion. It is about being engaged all the time and chastised if you are not. It is about productivity and outputs, deliverables, creating opportunities, constant innovations and continuous improvement. It is about constant change.

We weren’t designed to think like that ALL the time. We are designed think and live in waves of energy use and energy rejuvenation. We NEED time to clear the mind before we inundate it again with new information. They might do it at Google with a groovy sleep-pod but I wonder what a partner at one of the big four consulting firms would say if they walked past a young consultant lying on a couch in a break out area re-charging…..

When you allow the space different thoughts come. When you allow space energy comes back, things become clearer, complexities make sense. You gain invaluable space to collect yourself before you immerse yourself back into the complexity of the modern organisation.

Reflection and space are fundamental to the human mind and have been part of the process of human creativity for time eternal. But we seem to have engineered the humanity and space OUT of our workplaces. Doing nothing is bad. Thinking is done on your own time. The busiest are celebrated as the hardest workers and a “big day” is back to back meetings…even if they achieve nothing.

Time out to reflect makes you mentally stronger and more resilient.

Now I know that wilderness based programs are not for everyone or every client. It is also not some magic bullet for individuals or dysfunctional teams. The most powerful workshops and programs I have seen are driven by a specific organisational need (a change in strategy or critical need for specific new skills and capabilities) not some generic attempt to improve leadership. So matching an organisation’s people needs with an outdoor program may be inappropriate and not a great use of time or money. But there have been more than a few times in my 15 years of corporate facilitation where I have been in the middle of a team workshop and thought…”Just give me TWO days in the bush with you…and I guarantee things would shift….”.

It was amazing to be a part of that all again. I am not young enough to do it all the time and my family time is too important – but I still maintain my belief in the profound power of a thoughtfully designed wilderness leadership program.

If you are out there reading this and wondering about how you disrupt, develop or energise your people…..I urge you to take the longer walk home tonight, through the park, by the river or sit by the harbour. Just take 10 minutes in nature and slow the mind – then imagine that feeling multiplied by a thousand.

It works.