Sailing
Do you feel the wind in your sails? Or do you feel you have to pull the oars more than ever, just to not go backwards?
Since our early ancestors first dug out a tree trunk to make a canoe, people have built ever more sophisticated ways to traverse water.
Floats, reeds tied together, an ark, galleons, kayaks, Viking ships… All of these worked on buoyancy – and the weight of the crew, cargo, and ballast (which historically was a heap of rocks in the bottom of the boat) to keep them from tipping over.
The keel was the spine of the ship: a central long straight piece of wood that the whole ship was built around. It has given us the expression “to be on an even keel”: if the keel wasn’t “even”, the boat would weir right or left – sorry, starboard or port. As boats were landed on beaches, they were generally flat on the bottom – an “old-fashioned rowboat” in various forms and sizes; some with masts, rigging, and sails.
And then somebody changed the game by adding to the keel.
To understand the importance of this invention, think of a seesaw. A seesaw is a lever “moving in the horizontal plane”. A ship works like a lever “moving in the vertical plane”. If you push at something above the rotation point, like the wind in a sail, you want something else pushing counter below the rotation point – or the whole thing tips over. Lean far over the side of a kayak and you will be shown immediately what happens when you don’t have enough force pushing “counter”.
That “something” pushing below the rotation point is typically buoyancy. The side of the vessel is pushed down into the water, and the water wants to push it back up – if it weighs less than water. (As long as a boat is full of air on the inside, even a steel hull weighs less than water.)
But buoyancy can only give you that much force. Add too much sail and around she goes.
One remedy is to move weight – the crew e.g. – to the wind side of the boat. To the force of buoyancy, we have added the force of gravity pulling on the weight of the crew.
Adding weight to the keel has a totally different effect size. This is a lever, remember. The crew is sitting in the boat, close to the rotation point. The bottom of the keel is as far from the rotation point as you can get – adding weight here is like putting somebody at the end of the see-saw. And the longer the lever, the more force from the same weight.
With a deep and heavy keel, it is like having an adult at the one end of the seesaw. Now we can pile many more kids to the other end before the thing moves. To the ship, this is adding more sails.
If you go to a boat-work, you will see almost all the yachts standing in some support structure because they have keels going 3-8 feet below the water line and can’t balance on land without a scaffold. If you see an empty oil tanker, cruise ship, or container ship, you may see the top of the bulb nose of the keel that helps keep the high structure from tipping over in a storm. Although these big ships don’t have sails, if they are ten or twenty stories tall, the ship itself gets pushed by a lot of wind.
It has been my observation that a whole lot more attention is given to sails than to keels. That is not surprising. Look at any picture of a beautiful tea clipper and all you see are sails – lots and lots of them. You don’t see a metal-plated keel below the waterline – but if it wasn’t there, what a tea party that would make.
It has also been my observation that people can take the role of the sail or the role of the keel. Although it is hard to be both at the same time, we need to act as “sails” if we want to go anywhere, and we need “an even keel” if we want to get there safely. We may have a predisposition to being one or the other, or we may lean more in one direction than the other during different phases in our lifetime.
Like with the pictures of the clippers, we see a lot of coverage of the movers and shakers, the “move fast and break things” crowd, and the billionaires who invented a business model that could “scale”. We don’t see as much of the stabilizers, connectors, and peacemakers. In organizations, management typically doesn’t even know who these people are. But if they were to leave, they increase the risk of other people leaving with up to 500%.
Why are we so fascinated by bigger, faster, higher? Why is it more important than closer or more content? Is it one of those collective stories that we tell each other but don’t really believe in for ourselves personally (and we probably know that on our deathbed, we will find that it was a false priority)? Are we conflicted about this?
I am. Sure, it is awesome that a lot of people see an article or download a book, but how deep is that impact? And even if there is impact, the author rarely gets to know; how often do we reach out to authors who are not already part of our network?
Might it take some kind of a personal relationship for people to become open to being influenced by how they think and behave?
It is in the very nature of many of the services offered by people in the BizCatalyst360 network, that they are personal. You don’t coach people – you coach one person at a time. Therapists treat a client. And while we may have more than one client, there are only that many hours in the day. There is even a limit to how many people we can gather on Zoom and have a productive endeavor.
Personal relationships can’t be scaled. Isn’t that what makes them precious? So precious that they can affect attitudes and behaviors.
I don’t think we should have to apologize for not being “scalable”.
Next time you feel you are not the sail, assume you are not an anchor, either; you are probably the keel, invisible below the waterline. But no sail can be unfurled, and no destinations safely reached without an even keel doing its invisible magic somewhere in the process.
Hat tip to Yonason Goldson for sharing Todd Rose’s work and provoked by Craig James’ post on Industry.
