I know I'll come back to this one but just to capture a few thoughts before the next ten incredibly interesting meetings come to pass...
Last week, we had the chance to meet with Dr. Daniel Gray Wilson, Research Director at Harvard's Project Zero who leads the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA). Daniel, articulate, funny, and generous with his ideas, is researching Extreme Adventure Teams, which I, for one, had never heard of before.
These people are nuts: "Co-ed teams of four athletes that race together across 400-600 miles of unfamiliar terrain in a nonstop, multidisciplinary format (hiking, biking, climbing, rafting, etc)." They don't know the course they'll have to "run" until hours before the race, thus there's none of this running the Boston Marathon course in advance that elite runners do...or anything like it. These races take place in obscure places - like from East to West on the Southern Island of New Zealand, with the competitors having to traverse The Remarkables, the steep range (and only one of two mountain ranges in the world that runs plumb north and south - the other, The Rockies).
Daniel is studying how these teams perform, collaborate, make decisions, and prevail. Very interesting stuff and I look forward to reading more about what he's doing - and spending more time in conversations like the exciting one we had last week.
For more, Forbes magazine featured Daniel's work in a 2006 article, "Leadership in the Wild."
