Pushing limits on the mountain: conquer your north face!

The global economy is (still) in crisis. Some managers now realise that their previous planning methods no longer work. New tools could help, which Rainer Petek presents in his "Nordwand-Prinzip" (North Face Principle). Whether the Matterhorn, the Eiger or the Grandes Jorasses – in business, too, there are one or two cliffs to overcome. The extreme mountaineer reports – with examples from his consulting practice…

Looking back, I can say today that any concrete goal I might have set myself would have fallen miles short of what actually became achievable for me later on.

When my friends and I quite literally got going and set out to become climbers, I didn't have the faintest idea of the possibilities that would later open up for me in climbing. Climbing is more than just a workout fitness programme.

Now you might object that you need a goal in order to head in the right direction. In the spirit of: "If you don't know which port you're sailing to, no wind is the right one." I believe that if I had set myself a concrete goal too early, the danger that I would have settled for the normal route would have been very great.

From comparing it with the other sports I did, I knew that the mountains were my playing field. I also knew it because I listened to myself. I set off in that direction because, as I went along, this path felt right to me.

With the mountains I entered a playing field that fascinated me, but which was at the same time new and unknown, with no supporting team and no goal already set up. I wanted to explore this new field, and I didn't want to follow the normal route to the summit. Because the normal route would have taken me where the crowds were. I wanted to discover and experience the fascinating mountain world of solitary peaks. And I wanted to go where the others didn't go.

"Dare to do it" – discovering new territory

I took the following lessons from the rock face with me from my early days and later transferred them to other areas of life. You can take these thoughts as impulses for breaking new ground:

To discover new territory, you don't necessarily need concrete goals at the beginning, let alone a detailed plan. What matters is enthusiasm and energy based on alertness and level-headedness. Ask yourself: what thoughts about the future energise me?
When you discover a new playing field for yourself, direction is more essential at the start than a concrete goal. The path has to feel right as you walk it. Ask yourself: what could my playing field be, and in which direction would I need to set off?

Concrete goals that you set yourself at the beginning would fall miles short of what is possible later. It's much more important to get into action. Consider: what can I start with today?

Key questions for the individual

In my consulting work with executives, managers and entrepreneurs, I observe that some already seem drained at a young age, while others are still fresh and energised even after many years in a particular field. Whether someone is lacking in energy or full of strength seems to me to have less to do with fitness, personal constitution or average weekly working hours, and much more to do with whether someone has found a playing field that gives them more energy than it takes.

Ausgesessen!: Warum uns die Kultur des Nicht-Entscheidens unsere Zukunft kostet (Sat Out! Why the Culture of Not Deciding Is Costing Us Our Future)
Das Nordwand-Prinzip. Food for thought for a contemporary management of uncertainty…

In my experience, people who are on a path that is entirely their own are endowed with great energy, even though they face the same difficulties and challenges as their drained colleagues.

The path supplies them with energy as they walk it; it forms a line of strength.

If you're currently searching: how can you find your playing field? How can you tell whether you're on the line of strength of your path or off on the powerless sidelines?

I recommend asking yourself two central questions. These questions seem simple, but are usually difficult to answer:

Who am I? What is my greatest potential?
Why am I here? What is my task?
To find answers to these questions, thinking isn't enough. Nor does it help simply to work through a structured sequence of questions. A crash course in vision with fifteen other stressed-out people probably won't bring the answers you want either. To engage with these questions in greater depth, you have to listen to yourself and perceive the answers from within.

Michael Ray, professor of creativity and innovation, starts from the assumption that there are two people in every person: the person they have become, and the one they could become in the future. What a person could become is not to be defined as a goal, but as a potential inherent in them, sometimes still vague.

To be able to perceive this potential, you need space and time to listen to yourself. Such listening requires quiet; the answers must not be drowned out by noise, either outside or inside. Perceiving your own potential also requires that you listen to yourself not just once but more often, ideally regularly.

The outward structure this inner dialogue follows is likely to vary from person to person. Some people meditate because it calms their mind and lets them hear their inner voice better. For others, writing is the method of choice: putting down on paper, without self-censorship, whatever comes as a spontaneous answer to the questions above.

It's also surprising what can come bubbling out of people when someone they trust repeatedly asks the questions "Who are you? What is your greatest potential? – Why are you here? What is your task?", follows up on the answers and helps the other person give expression to their inner voice. For me, for example, it's particularly helpful to engage with these questions while walking, hiking or sitting in the quiet of nature.

Sepp Zotter, the man who reinvented chocolate, chose another way: during a difficult phase of reorientation he cancelled all his newspapers, gave away his television and used the time this freed up to grapple intensively with the questions about his optimal playing field.

Today he exports his innovative chocolates worldwide, and his chocolate factory – although located in a very rural region – is visited by 80,000 people a year. Finding out what works for you is just as fundamental a part of the search for your own playing field as working on it continuously. Answers to these questions aren't a matter of a weekend.

Key questions for companies

Companies, too, have to find their playing field and grapple with the key questions:

Who are we? Who could we become?
Why are we here? What is our task?

Especially at the start of entrepreneurial activity, it's important to let yourself be guided into the future by the answers to these central questions of identity. Like an individual, a company can listen to itself: in the form of workshops, through dialogue, through strategic time-outs.
Amar V. Bhidé interviewed the founders of 100 companies from the list of the 500 fastest-growing US companies and discovered that most of these entrepreneurs "had no plan":

41 % had no business plan at all,
26 % had only a rudimentary business plan scribbled on scraps of paper,
5 % had worked out financial forecasts for investors,
28 % drew up a comprehensive business plan.
Hearing the call of a possible future and setting off is probably more important than having an all too concrete idea of your goal right from the start. Sometimes the quiet signals of a possible future sound in quite inconspicuous places. It may be an encounter with other people, or chance, that brings certain ideas your way.

Win!

Until 31.07.2013 we are giving away a total of five copies of the book, delivered free. What do you have to do? Answer the following question in a comment on this page or on our social media channels: What is your north face… and how did you conquer it?

Translated from German by Claude. Read the original in German.