Into the Wild

The senior managers of Timbuk2, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of messenger bags, gathered on a gently sloping granite ledge at an altitude of 12,000 feet, overlooking the blue-gray shimmer of one of the dozen or so Ice Lakes, slopes of stubby pine trees, and beyond onto ragged peaks. It was the middle of June, but snow still mounded on the ground. A thunderstorm had just skirted the campsite and the wind screamed constantly, cold and fierce.

These four men and two women lead a growing company of 70 employees back at sea level, where they'd typically be worrying about things like financing, brand management, e-commerce, and retail sales. But for the past four days they'd been in the backcountry, and their concerns had been somewhat more basic: Would that small blister turn into a festering sore? Would those dark clouds bring rain? Does that bear paw print in the mud mean there's an actual bear nearby?

The group was halfway through a seven-day backpacking trip organized by the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS. Accompanying them were two NOLS instructors and me; I'd tagged along to see what would happen. It had been nearly 100 hours since any of us had had a shower, or used a flushing toilet, cradled a cell phone to our ear, or run our fingers across a keyboard. As the sun started to set, the temperature, which had hit the high 80s when we'd set out from the town of Lander, Wyoming, just four days before, was hovering just above freezing.

The reason we were all sitting there that night, in varying degrees of ache, chill, and fatigue, was that Timbuk2 CEO Perry Klebahn had an audacious goal: to accomplish six months of team building in six nights in the wilderness. The company was in the midst of a turnaround, and this particular group--the CFO, the directors of operations, sales, and e-commerce, and a manager of international sales--were all recent hires and had worked together for less than two months. "In six months to a year, this will be a great team, but I can't wait for that," Klebahn said to me when we first talked on the phone, about a month before we left for Wyoming. The company, he said, was completely overhauling its infrastructure and operations to keep up with growing demand. "We're not used to working together. We don't know one another's sense of humor, what stresses us out. My hope is that this trip will get us down to that level, so that we can understand one another--what we're all like and what makes us tick."

In theory, I understood what Perry was talking about. But as I shivered that night, I had to ask myself the question that had brought me to Wyoming in the first place: Does getting cold, smelly, achy, and tired with your co-workers really accelerate a team's development? After all, there are any number of team-building exercises out there, and, as I thought about them that frigid night, each struck me as a good deal easier than what the Timbuk2 team was up to. Some companies build rapport by taking cooking, dancing, or drumming classes together. Others stage role-playing team challenges, where you just pretend to rescue someone, from, say, a windswept peak, instead of actually sitting on one wondering how bad your altitude-induced headache is going to be the next morning. Others try to tap creativity--challenging teams to, say, design a package to keep an egg from breaking when it is dropped. Then there are what have become corporate team-building clichés: paintball competitions, ropes courses, trust falls, and my personal favorite--the luxury resort.

But while all those things can be fun, they don't have a track record for building bonds between people as effectively as good old-fashioned discomfort and suffering. In fact, very few things work better, says Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford. "Boot camp and other forms of extreme indoctrination work because of the suffering," he says. "This is what military boot camp does, fraternity hazing does, medical school does. It congeals people and convinces them that some cause is important." Cults and other various and sundry brainwashers, of course, have known this forever.

I got to know Perry Klebahn pretty well, and I can say with certainty that he is not a sadistic brainwasher or a cult leader. But it's hard not to notice that the psychological theory of…let's call it extreme team building seemed consistent with his goals for the expedition. During our phone conversation before leaving on the trip, he said, "We're trying to get everyone to work together, and we're very committed to the idea of removing status. Status gets in the way of things. This will be an interesting way to put us all off balance, and then get us down to a team that can function better together."

NOLS, for its part, would object to the idea that it is trying to make people suffer needlessly. It sends its students out into the field with plenty of food, fuel canisters for cooking, and the appropriate gear to cope with weather extremes in relative comfort, says Dave Glenn, director of NOLS Professional Training, the division of the organization that deals with corporate groups, when I met with him in his Lander office the day before we set out for the Popo Agie Wilderness, deep in Wyoming's Wind River Peak Range. But the courses are designed to be physically demanding--hard enough to make you drop your public persona and act like who you really are. Indeed, the reason outdoors courses are more effective than, say, team challenges involving keeping eggs from breaking is that this isn't make-believe. "You really have to do it out there," said Glenn, gesturing out his window toward the mountains. "If you decide not to set up your tent, and it rains, or if you get lost--the consequences are real." For 11 students out of 85,000 taught by NOLS since 1965, the consequences have been fatal. (Most of those incidents, it should be noted, occurred during the organization's early years.)

When people camp together, Glenn continued, the concept of privacy entirely disappears: From the time you first open your eyes in your tent to the moment you fall asleep to the sound of your colleagues' snores, you are together. What's more, you're isolated from your friends and family and all of your normal support systems. You have no choice but to interact with the people around you. You also have no choice but to exhibit all of your less than pleasant qualities--early morning crankiness, passing anxieties, and full-on temper-tantrum meltdowns--in front of everyone. As I got up to leave Glenn's office, he shook my hand and gave me a big broad smile. "You can't escape."