15. THE WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE:
A GATEWAY TO DIALOGUE

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self. … And
to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one’s self.

—Søren Kierkegaard

By early 1982 we had raised sufficient capital for the start-up phase; we had our trustees, advisors, and staff all in place; and we had designed the organizational structure for the delivery of the program. The plan was to bring together twenty to twenty-five leaders from each of several communities nationwide, including corporate executives, public officials, and leaders in education, labor, religion, art, the media, and the professions. These individuals would constitute a class, which would be administered and supported by a local chapter. Annual classes out of each community would convene beginning in June of each year.

Our biggest challenge at this point was to design the specific program segments within the very tight constraints that were given: it must be a world-class program; it must meet the objectives set forth in the trustees’ guiding principles; it must be deliverable simultaneously in multiple communities; and it must meet tight budgetary guidelines. After running a pilot program in Houston that tested many of the specific program segments under design, I began pursuing one of my earliest and strongest hunches. From the beginning, I had known that our curriculum must include a segment to foster an intense engagement that would not only get the fellows past the blocks Bohm talked about, but that would also alter the way they experienced one another.

This would be the gateway to the inner education of the fellows, which was at the very heart of the program. Bohm said we had to find a way to communicate with people that would dissolve the blocks within them and transform them. In London, Bohm had talked to me about the human capacity for collective intelligence, for generative conversation and resulting coordinated action:

At present, people create barriers between each other by their fragmentary thought. Each one operates separately. When these barriers have dissolved, then there arises one mind, where they are all one unit, but each person also retains his or her own individual awareness. That one mind will still exist when they are separate, and when they come together, it will be as if they hadn’t separated. … It’s actually a single intelligence that works with people who are moving in relationship with one another. … If you had a number of people who really pulled together and worked together in this way, it would be so remarkable.

Most people had a block, according to Bohm, because “they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore they never face the possibility because it’s too disturbing, too frightening. … There must be a communication that will take place that will dissolve that block.” My hunch in 1982 was that a wilderness experience constructed according to the principles proposed by Kurt Hahn of the Gordenston School in Scotland was the most effective way to dissolve that block.

During the early part of World War II, Kurt Hahn had been commissioned by the Royal Navy to help determine how to deal with an unusual phenomenon. When the Royal Navy’s ships would go down in the frigid North Sea, a large proportion of the sailors would die before help could arrive. But a strange thing was happening—those who survived were almost all older people in their forties. The younger, seemingly more fit and hearty people in their twenties, were perishing.

Hahn studied the situation and came to the conclusion that the older people were surviving because they had been through the trials and tribulations and exigencies of life itself. They had grown in body, mind, and spirit, and had the will to live and to deal with extremely demanding new challenges. The younger people simply had not developed that kind of inner capacity. Hahn created a new educational experience that helped these young people develop the kind of staying power that was necessary. They began surviving in the same numbers as the older men. After the war, Hahn brought this concept to America, and the result was the Outward Bound movement.

Hahn’s theory was that the limits to our potential are mostly imagined. His courses were designed to present the participants with a series of increasingly difficult tasks. First you accomplish something you never conceived you could have accomplished. The next day you accomplish something even more amazing, and on succeeding days you keep surpassing your previous accomplishments. By the end of the course, your image of what is possible for yourself is altered forever.

Hahn’s second objective was to heighten the participants’ sense of duty and compassion to those around them. No one can fully explain what propels individuals toward particular acts of compassion and altruism, but it’s clear that there are principles in human beings that drive them to help one another. Hahn believed that people are social beings and learn best in a group setting. He formed learning groups which amounted to tight communities that created an environment stressing the value and need to care for others. He believed that these deep, primitive human impulses could best be strengthened in an elemental setting.

In 1982, when I began working on the wilderness experience as part of the curriculum, I called the Colorado Outward Bound School and spoke to Reola Phelps, who was the executive director of their newly formed executive program. I told her a little bit about the Leadership Forum and asked for a meeting. The following week I went to Colorado and met Reola and three of her colleagues, David Chrislip, Eric Malmborg, and Peter O’Neil. It was an effortless and very special gathering, and we all shared a full understanding of how the program would be constructed and delivered. I told them my dreams about the Leadership Forum and shared with them what I thought it could do for the country and for the world. I knew as we spoke together that we were communicating at a level much higher than words alone and I felt an intense personal connection with them.

As we designed the wilderness segment, we set forth five objectives:

1. Strengthen the fellows’ power of self-belief, their feeling of self-efficacy, and the belief that they can accomplish what they set forth to do. It was our intent to give them the clear message that they were using only a fraction of their true capacity. We then would give them solid evidence of that fact.

2. Encourage the fellows to rely on their inner resources that are so seldom tapped, to use their intuition and the ability to extemporize and innovate in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.

3. Build deep trust and respect among the group, and help each fellow get beyond the devaluing prejudices that we all hold. Build true teamwork among the group and have them experience—perhaps for the first time—what deep alignment in a group feels like. Foster an experience of how a group of leaders from many sectors in a community can coalesce around issues of shared concern and move to successful resolution.

4. Put the fellows in situations that will cause them to reach deeply into themselves and be led into what Bohm called “the generating depth of consciousness which is common to the whole of mankind.” Evoke their higher nature and have them experience that we are all connected.

5. Learn from the entire experience how to be flexible and adapt quickly to change and new environments.

The American Leadership Forum program curriculum was tested and in place by 1983. Each class experienced a program of approximately twenty days’ duration over the course of a year, starting with an orientation session to begin the process of connecting the fellows. The orientation was also designed to prepare them for the wilderness experience, which usually took place in early July, when the weather in the Rocky Mountains was appropriate for rock and peak climbing. The program was predominantly experiential, not only in the wilderness segment, but also in other segments, most notably the Leadership in Action segment in which participants learned by doing in the context of a project of value to the community. Annual classes were eventually convened in Houston, Hartford, the state of Oregon, Tacoma, and Silicon Valley.

The wilderness experience was designed as a six-day segment. The fellows usually arrived at the base camp in the late afternoon on a Friday and departed six days later. During this time the group undertook rock climbing, classroom instruction, outdoor exercises of various types, a climb of a fourteen-thousand-foot peak, a twenty-four-hour solo experience (camping in the wilderness alone), and the closing ceremonies. The group work was broken up often with plenty of time for individual reflection and journal writing. Watches and clocks were not used during the entire experience.

The full year’s program was ultimately designed to be an inner journey for the fellows, not unlike the hero’s journey Joseph Campbell wrote about in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The quest was a transformative cycle consisting roughly of three stages: separation or departure; the trials, failures, and victories, including a supreme ordeal; and finally, the return to and reintegration into society. The wilderness experience was itself a mini hero’s journey—an inner journey of discovery and personal renewal. I personally loved the wilderness segment of the program, and for the first several years went through the entire program with one of the classes. Over the years, I witnessed the most moving and profound changes in both individuals and groups, and I was, in the process, personally transformed.

Part of the magic of the experience lay in the sheer beauty of the setting: the breathtaking sight of the high mountains, the sweep of the sky, the panorama of the great valley. The beauty drives you out of the self for a moment—so that for this time, the self is not. It’s that indescribable feeling of coming together, time suspended; of being linked to the universe. But there is a far more primordial aspect to this. For tens of thousands of years, human beings and the wilderness could not be separated—“one has been the context for the other.” As this occurred to me time and time again, it reminded me of the basic notion in quantum theory about the inseparability of the observer and the observed.

At the very beginning of the six days, the larger group was divided into two subgroups for purposes of conducting various exercises. At the conclusion of each exercise, each subgroup formed a circle and dialogued about the lessons learned. Each day the two groups came together for larger conversations. There was also a constant shifting from group dialogue to inner dialogue, when the participants took time alone to reflect and write in their journals. The setting, the high adventure, and the group endeavor all contributed to a certain state of being, out of which the participants could listen and speak and learn more effectively.

Each person was tested in his or her own way: fear of height, fear of being alone, fear of failure, fear of looking foolish. Early on in the experience, it became clear that one had to rely on the group to make it. An intense personal connection among the group developed—the kind of connection people long for and seldom find as they reach adulthood.

Each exercise was designed to build true trust among the fellows, those perfect moments David Halberstam spoke of, the moments of swing. Climbing the 150-foot rock face was the first such experience and perhaps the most powerful. Here’s how one Hartford fellow described it:

I am sitting at the top of a cliff and I mentally compose this letter, tied to a rope anchored in rock. The early morning sun has given way to a cold drizzle. My hands hold tightly the rope which drops down to a partner who is inching her way up the cliff.

The experience I describe is that of belaying a fellow climber up a cliff. No relation between two people is as intimate and so completely based on trust. The rope is there for protection, not, as some might imagine, to hold onto. My partner is invisible until the last few feet when her head emerges over the edge of a rock six feet below me. What holds us together is a carefully crafted system of verbal calls, and the subtle tension on the rope. Those are signs of a contract between us. No one, least of all an inexperienced novice, would commit life itself to the side of an exposed cliff without complete trust in the belayer.

The fourth and fifth days were spent in preparing for and executing the peak climb. In the early years of the program, we climbed Mt. Elbert, the highest peak in Colorado at 14,300 feet. The climb and return usually took about fourteen hours. It was a physical, mental, and emotional experience, and one that was always special to me.

I’ll never forget the first peak climb I did with the Houston Class I. After spending the night at a high base camp, we arose at three in the morning to pack our gear and eat breakfast. We had to reach the summit before noon because of the risk of thunderstorms that often form later in the day at high altitudes. Lightning can be particularly deadly above the treeline, where we would all be so exposed.

We struck out at the appointed time in pitch darkness. We climbed for hours below the treeline, and finding our orientation in these conditions was difficult. We took wrong courses and had to double back a number of times. The grade was extremely steep, and backtracking was a painful affair because we all recognized the noon deadline and the need to conserve energy. Along the way, a hundred kindnesses occurred every hour. Gender and racial differences had long since melted away, and all the way to the summit, people were helping people.

As we passed the treeline at around twelve thousand feet, we saw nothing but rocks. The wind was howling, the temperature was frigid, and at first we could see no vegetation whatsoever. But after a time, we began to notice the absolutely magnificent, tiny, tiny flowers that grow in the summertime upon the top of the mountain. We had to look hard to see them because they were in between the rocks where just the barest hint of sunlight falls on the tiny patches of soil. The colors were intense—deep, deep yellows and purples, and the most crimson of all crimsons. There they were, not only surviving, but flourishing. As we observed them, we drew strength from the little flowers that could thrive in this kind of environment. We called it the “land of the one-inch giants.”

But there was more to it than that; I found myself treasuring these little flowers but knowing that I wouldn’t pick one for anything in the world. It was a deeply moving aesthetic experience that did not move me to possess the object; the beauty was in the simple beholding of it. I could see the rhythm of the universe up there—the relationship of the sunlight to the little flower, and of the soil to the flower, and of the mist to the flower and to the soil, and of the sunlight that broke through the cloud and the mist and the fog. As I slowly moved through the land of the one-inch giants, I felt, once again, completely in accord with the universe.

The pain of the last fifteen hundred feet was intense for all of us. There is very little oxygen at this height, and our lungs were burning. Every muscle in my body was aching, and I wondered if I could take another step. Many of us experienced altitude sickness, dizziness, and sheer exhaustion. Muscle cramps, severely blistered feet—the group fought through it all. The wind was high, and the windchill factor was thirty degrees below zero. But when we broke through the last ridge to the summit, it was an indescribably sublime experience: the whole horizon opened up, and with this my consciousness expanded as well.

We were all overcome with emotion. We formed a circle and held hands in silence for a long time, the vast panorama lying behind us. It was as if we were literally on top of the world. There were no boundaries between any of us, and time seemed to stand still. We were communicating at a deep level with one another—much like my experience with the ermine. Finally, Don Wukasch, a Houston heart surgeon, spoke, reciting by memory from René Daumal:

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down. … So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. In climbing, take careful note of the difficulties along your way; for as you go up, you can observe them. Coming down, you will no longer see them, but you will know they are there if you have observed them well.

There is an art of finding one’s direction in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

Again we stood in silence, absorbed in the moment. Then Rabbi Roy Walter spoke in Hebrew:

Blessed are you O Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who has given us life, sustained us in life, and brought us together to share this moment in time.

The return to the high base camp was made as quickly as possible to avoid the thunderstorms. When we reached the base camp, it was almost dark, and everyone was exhausted. We changed out of our wet clothes—we had encountered rain on the way down. Dry socks were heaven. We ate a light meal and broke camp for the solo experience, each person camping alone in the wilderness with only a few necessities and a solo tarp. It was an opportunity to reflect upon the lessons of experience, to integrate as best we could what had occurred over the past week, and to write in our journals.

Being out there alone in the wilderness for me was at once a powerful and peaceful experience. It was like visiting the great cathedral at Chartres. I could feel the energy field, and it was as if I were participating in divinity itself. I was in awe of the sheer wonder and beauty of it all. Over the hours that passed, the recognition that I was in the presence of something larger than the human dimension grew greater and greater.

The following day, after breaking solo camp, the group came together at the high base camp for a dialogue around the campfire. We sat in a circle around the fire. The circle is a powerful symbol suggesting no beginning, no end. It speaks to us of the journey itself. We had been on a journey for a week, and now we were contemplating a larger journey. Within the bounded circle the power of the community among us continued. The same feeling was present as had been with us at the summit—the silence, the speaking only from the heart, the harmony of being, the awe and reverence for the beauty around us. The principal difference, though, was that we spent several hours in this dialogue, and matters of substance were brought up and dealt with—matters which, under normal circumstances, are undiscussable: prejudice, race, gender issues. The diversity of the group added great power to the dialogue. There was a lot of emotion, but also deep listening and learning. At this stage the fellows were operating as “open systems.” They had entered the experience with sets of assumptions about themselves—images of who they were, and what they could and could not do. One by one, as the fellows accomplished so much more than they conceived was possible, these images were destroyed.

In addition, the fellows had participated in classroom work based upon the Leadership and Mastery course devised by Kiefer and Senge. That had been a powerful experience in and of itself, resulting in a suspension of prior assumptions about human nature, consciousness, and the fundamental nature of things.

On the final day, just a few hours before the group boarded the bus to Denver for the flight home, the closing ceremony took place. This was a final collective conversation at which each person presented his or her totem: an object found during the solo experience that best symbolized his or her feelings about the wilderness experience and its meaning.

By almost any measure, we felt the design of the wilderness experience had accomplished what we had wanted: to provide the gateway to those fundamental shifts of mind and being, so necessary to servant leadership. The theme consistently expressed through the totem ceremony was “the peace and love we have shared together,” the “deep connection” felt among people who care so much, the “almost transcendental identification I feel with the other humans here,” the power of the physical environment which “borders on the mystical,” and the “metamorphosis occurring within.” I marveled at the consistency of these statements, regardless of the background of the person speaking: a city mayor, a chief of police, a labor leader, a CEO, a leader from the inner city, a journalist, you name it—these themes cut across every category, gender, race, and ethnic line in the community.

Over the years we heard the fellows express these same themes again and again as they presented their totems at the closing ceremonies. We had found a way to remove the blocks Bohm had talked to me about, but I began to wonder whether there was a way to accomplish this with a less elaborate and expensive process. As it turned out, David Bohm and his colleagues were in the process of providing at least a partial answer.