ORGL 689: Leadership & Hardiness              (Mt. Adams - Domestic Immersion)

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STATED OBJECTIVE:

The purpose of this course is to gain a deeper understanding of social relationships of interdependence and accountability associated with leadership and “a multi-sensory, experiential introduction to mindfulness undergirded by empirical research.” In a captivating alignment of resiliency training methodologies and modern neuroscience, this immersion course included an eight-week experiment in various resilience and adaptive mental techniques. This awareness created a mental space that increased the opportunity to respond rather than react to stressful situations. Given the urgency and criticality of leader’s decision making, this course was one of the most useful in the entire curriculum.

In what is possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience to authentically blend the mind, body, and spirit in theory and practice. Leadership and Hardiness requires a search for meaning, organizational intervention, discipline, existential courage, and a personal challenge that will impact both vocational and personal life. This course, grounded in theory, research, and application, delivers an educational "trinity" in a very creative and highly engaging way. Students also have an increased self-awareness and cultural sensitivity through critical reflection and action. Moreover, students learn to foster a capacity of integrating diverse ideas and perspectives from a variety of sources into a coherent perspective and presentation. They become familiar with a range of adaptability and evolutionary issues pertinent to leaders and organizations and analyze these matters using systems thinking and antifragile resiliency concepts and tools.

 

IMPACT QUOTEs:

What was needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead, think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our question must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. The last of human freedoms - the ability to choose one's attitude given a set of circumstances. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by the lack of meaning and purpose” – Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning.

 

I always wondered how I was going to die--and now--now I know. [It is] the culmination of all I have done and all I have wanted to do is this peak and this climb. As a team, you are the sum total of all your experience. When we got there and I looked up at the mountain, I didn't know what we were getting into. It is the test of the master climber. The center of the universe is unattainable. Climbing with your mentors is a dangerous thing because you give them all of your trust. The rewards of climbing are huge. The problem is you don't always 'come out' okay, people die and then you can't justify it. That is the great dilemma. The idea of not climbing was too much to imagine. It is in many ways a meditation on life, death, and everything in between. It was something that I had to do and you can't control the risk. A genuinely moving tale of super human perseverance and friendship. In the end, we knew that it was worth the risk--it was worth possibly dying for--believe in the impossible. How far would you go? How much would you risk to achieve the impossible?” – from Meru (Film Trailer).

 

Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don't dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control. By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trance-like state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard. In solo climbing the whole enterprise is held together with little more than chutzpah, not the most reliable adhesive” – Jon Krakauer, from Into the Wild.

 

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s non-meek attitude to randomness and uncertainty. We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition— like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics— have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable. Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance--even our own existence as a species on this planet. It determines the boundary between what is complex (living and organic), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object” – Nassim Taleb, from Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

 

Competencies Gained:

The course begins by engaging the spirit and our individual search for meaning. We start with this existential journey to understand the roots of the human mind and hardiness research. The course then shifts focus toward hardiness theory advanced by Maddi. Students implement ethnographic methods to learn about hardiness in their life and their current organization. Understanding the presence and the role of personal and organizational hardiness will contribute to clarity about ways to intervene and develop this quality in any organization. Students are required to implement a hardiness project in their organization that cultivates the principles of hardiness.

Incorporating an understanding of existentialism and how it represents the foundation of psychological hardiness. The course offers a personal evaluation of hardiness through scholarly literature, classroom exercises, classroom discussions, assignments, and simulations. Students partner to study a resilient organization that has responded well to adversity and challenge, and explore principles of hardiness embedded in organizational culture, climate, structure, operations and workforce issues.

The course concludes with a practice simulation that re-engages our advanced understanding of hardiness by challenging the mind, body, and spirit through an expedition climb of Mt. Adams. Mt. Adams serves as the metaphor for the personal and organizational challenge. It was at the forefront of course discussions, planning, training, and application of gained competencies. The purpose of the expedition is to recreate a highly stressful environment that engages the mind, body, and spirit equipped with the principles of hardiness. The challenge is unforgettable.

 

Course Instructor:

Adrian Popa, Ph.D.

 

Reference Materials:

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