The objective of the research was to understand what obstacles stand in the way of people acting according to their existing, and often extensive, knowledge of what constitutes moral and ethical behaviour. In addition, the question of what encourages and enables individuals to live and act ethically, was posed.

 The top three enablers of ethical action were upbringing, spirituality, and having good mentors and role models. Other enablers listed were: honesty, courage and integrity; self-control; conscience; standing up for one’s own beliefs; codes of conduct; self-knowledge; and defining moments.

 On the other hand, what emerged from the research is that a bottom-line mentality, organisational influences, fear, and peer pressure are the top four very real and dominant stumbling blocks to ethical conduct.

 In their responses, research participants made some interesting comments about the nature of the enablers and stumbling blocks in their lives.

 Respondents reported on the positive influences in their upbringing with feedback such as “I have the good fortune to have been guided by my mother who taught me to live a life based on consideration for others, to know the difference between right and wrong and to act in accordance with that knowledge, and if in doubt, to consult somebody who knows.”

 Another respondent highlighted how religion has played a role; saying that their “sense of right and wrong has been greatly influenced” by their religion. On the importance of mentors, one commented that, “I believe that mentors serve as beacons of light and morality, especially when faced with difficult decisions. I am fortunate enough to have had a number of mentors to date.”

 In describing stumbling blocks to choosing to behave ethically, a respondent mentioned that a bottom-line mentality can sometimes be caused by one’s desire to provide for one’s family; another pointed out that the pressure of having no financial option may cause one to betray one’s own moral code. One comment captures how fear can cause people to stay silent: “I should have left the company the first time I came to the realisation that I did not approve of the way we did business. I was afraid that I might not find another well-paying job, or I may have to move and start a new life again.”

 In analysing the managers’ responses, a number of key lessons emerged – they listed a number of behaviours and actions which could be taken to encourage and further develop their ethics and morals. These included:

Accept accountability – respondents felt it important to accept accountability as part of improving their ethics. This guideline ranked first in terms of nominations. Respondents felt that it was extremely important to act in accordance with their values and beliefs, if they were to improve their ethical performance in any way.

 Act in accordance with my values and beliefs. As one respondent put it “… that is where I think the crux [of] ethics lies. It is not whether you know the difference between ‘right’ and [‘wrong’], it is about whether you know the difference, but choose to ignore it for your own gain”.

 Act with moral courage – Several respondents felt that they needed to act with moral courage (which is very different to physical courage), especially when going against the flow. Others mentioned being courageous in terms of setting goals and boundaries for themselves.

 Be open-minded/suspend judgement – respondents mentioned the importance of not judging others based on their personal ethical standards or socially-constructed mental models.

 Be open, honest and transparent – the respondents highlighted the importance of being open, honest and transparent as ways to enhance enablers and overcome stumbling blocks within this seed.

 Build education and learning into life as much as possible – respondents felt that they could take an active role in their ethics progression by focusing on building continuous education and ongoing learning into their lives as much as possible.

Develop and make use of a support network – this guideline received the third most nominations. Several respondents mentioned that they would consider using a mentor to guide their ethical behaviour. Others suggested surrounding themselves with those they believed to have high moral and ethical standards.

Embrace diversity – respondents recognised the fact that different communities have different ethical standards, and these need to be understood and embraced.

Engage in the philosophical concept of ethics – respondents highlighted the fact that it is helpful to engage in philosophical debates and discussions on ethics, in order to help clarify their own perspectives and add rigour to their own understanding.

Exert greater self-discipline – respondents felt that by instilling greater self-discipline within themselves, and demanding excellence from themselves in all that they do, they would be better able to stick to their beliefs and perform in an ethical fashion.

Practice constant integrated awareness – ‘heightened awareness and exposure’ was cited and one respondent felt that she needed to increase her awareness of the fact that her decisions have an effect on others. Others felt that it was important to be aware of the impact of one aspect of one’s life in relation to other parts of one’s life – a systemic, personal awareness.

Religion/spirituality – religion/spirituality received the fourth most mentions; a number of respondents felt it was integral to them behaving ethically.

Increase self-awareness – this guideline received the second most mentions. Most respondents discussed the importance of checking their values and refining them if necessary according to the current priorities in one’s life. Others felt that by being fully self-aware, they would be in a better position to stand their ground.

As businesses globally become aware of the need to operate differently in a highly competitive environment, ethical behaviour is coming increasingly under the spotlight. Leaders, in particular, need to ensure that their behaviour is ethical and carefully considered as they are in a position to affect other peoples’ lives through their influence or power. The leaders who become truly powerful are those who lead as whole people. Nelson Mandela, for example, is held up as an outstanding example of a leader who did not, and does not, separate his deeply-held values and principles from his actions; and, in so doing, he embodies the essence of ethical leadership. Power, therefore, does not rest in one’s belief about one’s locus of control only, but in the action emanating from such belief as well.

 The research respondents were loud and clear about the fact that those times when they have behaved ethically, rather than taking an easier path, especially in an unsupportive environment, were amongst some of their most difficult life experiences. Yet, when they looked back and examined the lessons learned, the choices made, and the way they acted then helped forge their characters, developed their internal strength and inner compass, and gave them added confidence in their ability to handle difficult choices in the future. And, perhaps even more valuable, is that their experiences have given them a sense of freedom to inspire others to behave in the same way.

 Kurt April is a Professor of Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion at the UCT Graduate School of Business. The research was conducted with Kai Peters, Chief Executive of Ashridge Business School (United Kingdom); and Kirsten Locke and Caroline Mlambo of the UCT GSB. It was published in the Journal of Public Affairs in August 2010.

 For the journal Action Learning: Research and Practice I reviewed Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones’ Clever: Leading your smartest, most creative people. And? Well, I learned that clever people are clever but can be difficult. Why oh why did I have to spend 180 pages learning this? A tweet would have done the job… @bkgpeters – hey Kai, did you know that clever people can be difficult to manage? Um, yes, I did.

 I just finished another review last week, this time for the same journal where I was honestly a bit surprised to be asked again after my “Clever opinions”. The book, A Manager’s Guide to Leadership Development by Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne and Tom Boydell is aimed at practitioners, but originates from academics. Now in its second edition, the book is just great insofar as it is firmly based in research, but disguises it cleverly to not scare away management development practitioners nor practicing managers. For my money, this is really a very worthwhile investment for anyone with limited amounts of time and a thoughtful mind.

 Lastly, I had a go at Julian Birkinshaw’s Reinventing Management for the UK monthly Management Today. I liked that one as well. Birkinshaw posits that only focussing on leadership rather misses some of the more practical, occasionally mundane tasks of making things happen. Sleeves rolled up. Grind, not glory. He’s right, there are definitely days where keeping at it is more important than waving the standard bravely and charismatically. A point which he makes which I think is critical for managers and leaders to learn is that there is no perfect state of an organisation – that different parts need to be managed in different ways and that the pendulum constantly swings back and forth between centralisation and decentralisation.

Three out of four ain’t bad.

 Policy Exchange has a clear free market perspective and researchers seem to go back and forth between Policy Exchange work and doing research for Conservative politicians. In the report, they advocate a level playing field for education. Both public and private providers, which meet stringent quality levels, should have equal access to student funding, should be measured using the same quality frameworks and should be inspected on a similar time frame (10 years is advocated). All universities should be turned from complex charitable structures into non-taxed limited companies so that mergers and acquisitions are possible. I think that is right.

 For my sins, I’ve also read the Lord Browne report in its entirety and have been watching the unfolding debate both in parliament and on the streets with interest. Both reports are about what is public and what is private from different perspectives: from an ownership view, in terms of public versus private benefit, and in terms of whether the public purse or the private purse should pay – and how much should be paid.

 It will be fascinating to see what the next decade will bring. I expect UG fees to reach the maximum of £9000 annually immediately at reputed institutions. I think that £9000 puts too much of the burden on the individual. As a consequence, I think loan default rates and avoidance will be much higher than the government is predicting. Because of this, I expect a boom in private provision, part-time studies and on-line education.

 The whole educational supply chain of learning, teaching, researching, evaluating and degree-granting will be challenged. I also think this is right. All organisations, universities included, must ask themselves if what they are doing makes sense – especially if it has been fundamentally unchanged for 700 years.

 Over time, science matured, but the principles remained the same. Brain surgery became possible. In the 1950′s, electrodes were used to stimulate the brain. Maps were created linking parts of the brain to related body parts and mental functions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, finding volunteers who wanted electrodes shoved into their brains was a challenge and new methods were developed. Today, OIS (optical imaging of intrinsic signals) where cameras track blood flow around the brain are used on the rare occasions when the brain is exposed. A less precise, but non-invasive procedure is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). Using MRI machines has allowed researchers to study what happens in the brain when a variety of tasks are performed: moving a finger, confronting a dilemma, comparing Coke and Pepsi and even having an orgasm. (Bet that got your attention!).

 As James Shreeve colourfully describes it, your brain is “a 1.5 kg bolus of fat and protein, wrinkled like a cleaning sponge and with the consistency of curdled milk”. The brain is made of two fundamental parts. The limbic system, which is the older, more primitive, brain and the seat of emotion – the fight or flight centre. The cerebral cortex is the thinking area surrounding the limbic system where language, learning, memory and judgement reside. As an aside, there are also significant numbers of nerve cells, or neurons, in your heart and in your stomach which interact with your brain. If someone talks about a “good gut feeling”, it really is true.

 The brain is an electro-chemical wonder. Weeks after conception, half a million neurons are produced every minute leading ultimately to about 100 billion neurons in your brain. In the first and second trimester, these neurons reach out to each other to create points of contact called synapses. These synapses, which are created at the rate of 2 million connections a second during this period of gestation, can perhaps be metaphorically seen as the pathways of connection. Over time, some of these pathways get used regularly and turn into roads or even highways. Others, never used, grass over and disappear. At birth, for example, all children have the neural capacity to hear and pronounce all of the sounds in all languages yet they only maintain those that get properly developed while the others fade away. During the first 18 months of life, the brain is an information sponge. Stimulation creates strong synaptic connections. Non use leads to atrophy. In learning terms this is critical. Children who are not mentally stimulated at an early age will not be able to develop as well as children who do. Intelligence, which is theoretically equal at birth is defined by how the brain is developed by one’s surrounding. If children are not played with, read to and attended to, neuroscience has shown that they will fall behind.

 At age 2, the prefrontal cortex comes on line and with it comes a conception of space, language and thought. Interestingly, the last part of the “thinking” brain which develops is the part of the cortex which is responsible for social judgements, for weighing alternatives, planning for the future and for managing behaviour. This only occurs at the age of about 25. If you had always wondered about what was going on in teenagers heads – their judgement really is not all that developed and there is nothing that one can do about it.

 While the historical view had been that specific functions were contained in certain areas of the brain, modern research has shown that brains are much more nuanced. Functions are indeed weighted to general areas, but the brain is plastic and movement can occur. Parts of the brain can grow or shrink and even areas which are injured can have their tasks partially shifted to neighbouring zones.

 So over time, your brain has developed a certain set of synapse connections and a knowledge and behaviour repertoire. When something new comes along, you have somato-sensors in your brain which receive input from your senses of hearing, vision, touch, taste and smell. Impulses from the somato-sensors are processed in the hippocampus which compares incoming information with stored knowledge. The limbic system also adds emotional signifiers to this information. If the new input is judged to be positive, the hippocampus sends a pulse of dopamine which is both pleasant and stimulates memory. It also promotes the release of acetylcholinem which increases attention. If, however, the new impulse is judged to be bad or an overload, your amygdala, part of the emotional limbic system, blocks up and creates a sense of anxiety or panic. This amygdala hijack actually draws energy away from your cognitive prefrontal cortex, causing you to think less.

 While some of this may seem rather abstract, it is nonetheless fascinating when applied to learning and change which are, in effect, the same from a neuroscientific perspective. Most of the time, you are on autopilot. Driving the same way to work everyday does not require thinking. Performing similar work tasks regularly is equally unstimulating. Something really new, however, requires brain processing and this takes real energy. It is, in effect, tiring.

 Neuroscience and Learning

 Brain research is an emerging field. Ninety percent of brain research is less than ten years old. Almost all of the brain research which has been conducted in relation to learning and education has focussed on early childhood education. That said, real lessons for adult learning are emerging. If, as noted earlier, positive inputs release dopamine and create a virtual cycle of positive feeling and memory activation, creating a happy learning environment genuinely makes a difference. More fascinating is to think about novelty. Good novelty reinforces the positive. Bad novelty which induces an amygdala hijack or boredom actually works against learning.

 In designing learning interventions, there are numerous lessons here. First, think of something novel that enlivens the learning. Do something fun and unexpected and participant learning will increase. Do something which participants do not like, or find boring, and you will have neurologically lost them. In a traditional classroom, this would mean that it is critical to teach new and interesting material first and not review last week’s lesson again for reinforcement. In executive education, where simulations are used, be sure to use a believable, relevant activity.

 Neurons and synapses are also critical to learning. The new needs to create new synaptic paths. Walking metaphorically through the bush is simply not enough to create a new path, never mind a new highway. Repetition and reinforcement are necessary. New information needs to progress from working memory into stored memory. If something is not reinforced, it does not make this journey. If you have ever wondered why you cannot remember someone’s name when you have been introduced, it is because you have not repeated it to yourself several times and it has simply disappeared from your working memory. Through knowledge, your brain can actually grow. London cabbies, having had to learn “the knowledge” of 25,000 streets in Central London and important ones beyond, have an enlarged rear hippocampus. Blind people have an enlarged somato-sensory cortex where spatial senses which would have been provided entirely through sight, are replaced by spatial abilities developed through hearing, sound and feeling. This process would begin in anyone who is blind-folded for more than a few hours but would disappear once the blindfold is removed.

 Learning to do something differently is a far greater challenge than simply having to learn something new. You already have a developed synaptic superhighway which causes certain types of knowledge analysis and behavioural reaction. The longer one has reinforced this particular world-view, whether correct or not, the harder it is to alter. A brand new path needs to be created, cultivated and developed so that it becomes the new highway and the old one grows over. This can be accomplished through really hard work, but it is indeed hard to teach an old dog different tricks. Research has been conducted looking at the brains of different functional roles. As will be apparent, accountants really do have different brains than marketing people do. Getting them to see eye-to-eye requires some real neurological development.

 Neuroscience and Change

 As with learning to do something differently rather than learning to do something new, so too with change. When one speaks about change, what one is really looking for is behavioural change. Behaviour is even more deeply embedded than is cognition and is almost guaranteed to create an amygdala hijack with the related physiological discomfort. Ironically, people with more experience in a variety of settings tend to react better to change than those with a more limited experience set. Younger colleagues who have only known one reality can find change very tough.

 In looking at the neuroscience of change, what one is in effect doing is throwing a hard science at the field of psychology and testing the assumptions. Many prove to be incorrect. Thinking about one’s mistakes, for instance, simply reinforces the bad experiences rather than allowing you to move on. It is much better to use positive psychology to focus on what went right rather than on what went wrong. Appreciative Inquiry events are thus a very sensible approach to large group events. As with behaviourism, a humanistic approach is problematic as one is in effect telling people to change in a nice manner.

 From the neuroscience of education, we have seen that attention and focus are necessary to create an environment in which neurological development can happen. Repetition and reinforcement, in a positive way, are critical for new behaviours to develop. We all, however, have a limited capacity to pay attention. Working memory is limited and novelty must be embedded. Shorter, regular discussions are much more useful than multi-day marathons. If longer periods of concentration are needed because of scheduling requirements, then breaking the day up with other activities actually stimulates the brain, which continues to work in the background, rather than turning the brain off.

 Change must be owned. If a group is presented with the goals and how to get there, the natural neurological reaction is one of rejection. If, instead, the goals are presented and constraints are given but the path can be chosen by participants, successful outcomes are much more likely. If as a manager, you can paint a positive picture of a strived for future, and ask colleagues for help in getting there, the ideas they generate lead to positive dopamine release. Avoiding long discussions about problems is also critical. A recent study, interestingly, has used MRI scanning on people with positive and negative outlooks. It is actually possible to identify glass-half-empty people through a brain scan which reveals that the more electro-chemical activity happens on the left side rather than on the right side of the prefrontal cortex, the more positive you are. The study also showed that meditation moved activity to the left – at least for the monks who participated.

 Neuroscientific principles are already being actively applied in real settings. Positive psychology, visualisation, repetition and taking charge of the challenges are all key components of the US Army Center for Enhanced Performance at West Point, a centre based on cognition, neuroscience and health. It is a fascinating and emerging field which will become increasingly central to learning and change.

 The whole purpose of education is to help individuals develop their judgement. Judgement is about making decisions among choices and ethics, at the basis level, is about making choices. Some of these choices are easier than others but few choices are easy. Most are complex.

 Teaching ethics then is about considering how to make a choice. Is one Aristotelian and a judge of a person’s inherent character or does one favour Locke evoking absolute, natural rights? Is one an egoist to maximize individual good, a hedonist, seeking to maximize general pleasure or a utilitarian who calculates the greatest happiness for the greatest number?

 Managers make decisions which affect many others in their own organisations and in many countries around the world. There is no simple basis on which these decisions are based nor is there one specific set of rules upon which everyone can agree. It is only through dialogue that business schools can help students think these issues though. A discussion of ethics will never make the seven sins disappear. What teaching ethics can do is to make as many people as possible make as thoughtful decisions as possible.

 So the challenge then is how to get beyond knowing about and to approach 10,000 hours of practice without spending 10,000 hours at it! The easiest place to start is simply to do what one is reading about. In business schools, some claim that case studies are better than just reading. Well, sure, but they do not actually get to “doing” anything. Simulations and role plays go a step further. The problem here is that if the simulation is not credible, then it carries no weight. What it does attempt to do is to compress time and allow multiple rounds of decision making to act as a proxy for 10,000 hours.

 In some cases, one really can do concrete things rather than play act. Here at Ashridge, we do something called newsday where a team puts together a news programme. I’m thinking about how we can fast forward that activity into the here, now and tomorrow. In this thinking, I’m being helped along by my #PLENK2010 course which is into the third week of it’s data flood, discussion, and illumination. We are way beyond web 1.0 where traditional teaching is simply ported online (I did that sort of thing in the late 1980’s at IBM and in the early 1990’s in Rotterdam and it really is a bit dull). We have just passed web 2.0 where learners learn with the facilitator and there are no constraints on which learning tools are allowed. Yesterday we looked at www 3.0 stuff like datasift, twazzup, foursquare and storify. Most are still in alpha phases, but they do look like fun. In some cases, I can see piecing together things to amuse myself in others, piecing together interesting narratives. In all cases, it gives one the impetus to actually do, rather than just to see, and that, after all, is half the battle.

Functional competence. At the most basic level of ability, managers must understand the fields of finance, accounting, marketing, strategy, IT, economics, operations, and human resource management. Business schools are actually quite good at fulfilling these needs at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Business school departments most frequently are organized by functional silos, and academic journals also mirror those disciplines. Many studies acknowledge that graduates at this level are satisfied with their knowledge acquisition and value their increased skills once they are in the workplace.

 An understanding of context and strategy. Problems begin to appear at the next level of management. Rising executives need to understand how organizational processes interrelate and occur within a context. They must be able to make sense of societal changes, political drivers, social values, global interaction, and technological change. These needs present a dilemma for schools. One reason is that there is little cross-functional research at many institutions. Not only are there few outlets for interdisciplinary research, but it is difficult for any professor to be well-versed in a broad range of subjects. But there is a more critical reason. Without practical experience, it’s impossible for faculty members to acquire an understanding of the multidisciplinary nature of the world and the specifics of managing within context. To understand—and teach—such skills, professors must have had hands-on experience within managerial environments, whether they were in the private, public, or nongovernmental sectors.

 The ability to influence people. Building on their understanding of the interconnected nature of management, executives at the third level want to learn how to exert influence on their organizations. It is one thing to formulate a strategy, and it is quite another to implement that strategy while getting the buy-in of the rest of the staff. To be successful, managers must understand human drivers and the development of collective views. They must cultivate a broad understanding of societies and the sociology of organizations, and they must be able to challenge and communicate. Again, this presents a significant difficulty for business schools. There are simply not many faculty members who have a psychological understanding of human drivers. In addition, few faculty have any experience in practically influencing social constructs within organizations.

 Reflective skills. At the top level of management, executives need to develop themselves as human beings. Two considerations move them. First, as their seniority increases, they begin to reflect on their own wants, needs, and capabilities so they can set priorities and spend time on what’s most important. Second, as they rise within management ranks, they inevitably are aging. Top managers not only must prioritize their work efforts, they must prioritize their life goals. As they realize they are mortal, they must consider what they want to accomplish with what time they have left. Helping executives through these sorts of challenges is difficult for business schools. In fact, the best service providers at these times might be psychologists and life coaches, rather than traditional business school academics. It certainly won’t be the resident professor of accounting!

This is a session with moving around and people actually have to do things…

In four groups, the participants have to nominate an architect and, to simulate the problems of virtual teams, the architect stands behind a metaboard and has to describe an abstract picture while the other members of the team have to draw it.

An interesting observation is how difficult it is to hear the architect of your team when you have other sin the room also trying to do the same thing. A metaphor for the noise in the office that means that when you’re trying to sit through a WebEx session, it is sometimes too tempting to do some emails and read other websites while listening to the speaker.

One big learning I’ve got from the group nearest to me doing this exercise is how you all need to know what the right word you need is? Is it a trapesium or a squashy rectangle thingie? You know what you mean. Your team know what they think you mean. But do they know what you mean? Because they think they know what you mean, you might not realise for a long time that you actually mean something completely different.

The groups have now discussed what they did well and what they could have done better.

Do people need to discuss, before working together virtually, how they should work together?

There are some protocols and exercises that can really help everyone create the right culture to efficiently use a virtual communication (such as a WebEx session or a tele-conference), and avoid them reading emails while on the phone, and so on.

The take-aways for working and learning virtually:
Logitstics
1. everyone should use headsets that cover both ears – connected to a landline, not a mobile
2. work in a closed office
3. if you have glass walls to the office, try and turn your back to reduce distractions
4. work from home if possible, so long as the kids aren’t there!
5. avoid any other phone in the room you are in, avoid a laptop or computer (those pesky emails will beg for answering)
6. A must: everybod hsould be working on the phone (use the same channel of communication) even if two people happen to be in the same office on the day of the session. Working with a mixture of people, face-to-face and others virtually distort the communication!
7. No driving while in an Audio Action Learning session!

Getting ready for the work
1. establish some time buffer (15 minutes?) before the session to help focus your thoughts and remember what you needed to work on
2. establish some time buffer (20-30 minutes?) after the session to reflect and settle after the virtual meeting before moving on to the next meeting. Avoid having very important meetings directly after the session.

The process in the Audio Action Learning session
1. Focus the exercise – use up to 8 minutes to focus and concentrate on the issue at hand, regardless of the time-zone the attendees are in.
2. Working on people issues (as in face-to-face Action Learning)
3. Review after each round (also reviewing how the work goes virtually and what we learn from it)
4. Breaks in between rounds – e.g. 15 minutes
5. Completion exercise – a ‘virtual hand-shake’ or a ‘virtual kiss’ to say goodbye properly. The ritual is useful – it stops people feeling they’ve just been hung-up on!

Communication processes between sessions
1. Send reminder emails
2. Send teleconference details etc.

Ground rules
1. Confidentiality! What goes on in the virtual space, stays in the virtual space!
2. Joining late – if people join more than 10 minutes late, you may want to decide that it is too late as they will disrupt the flow and have missed the important issues.

Key Lessons / Learnings from remote team working exercise
1. Different skills – you can’t communicate with people in the same way virtually as in face-to-face…so you need to explain things differently – use different skills to get your point over.
2. Having the right attitude is very important – if people want to make it work, then you can usually find a way to make it work and focus on the task and on the relationship. Be positive!
3. Pay attention to what is filling in the blanks – when we cannot physically see, our mind fills the blanks. Context and culture fill in the blanks. Don’t assume everyone has understood you the way they would if you were in the same room.
4. Slow down to go faster – visual information travels faster than audio (light is speedier than sound!) – which also means that dysfunctional dynamics are amplified in the virtual space.
5. Spell it out and pause! – when working remotely, the need to be even more precise and explicit and giving time for questions is important. If people are working in a second language – think again.
6. Relax and make it normal for all – if you’re running a virtual session, you need to help them feel that it is usual and natural. Higher concentration is needed than face-to-face, so it’s important that people feel comfortable saying when they don’t understand something or were distracted.

At the end, the attendees wondered if they could catch up with each other four weeks after the event to discuss the issues raised today.
We’ll be interested to see if that actually works for all!

The only way she was able to do this was by using new technology to stay in touch with her family and team. Her weatherman, Ricardo, for example, was in Portugal.

She also explains how she fed her energy requirements… 500 bars of chocolate! And she still lost 20 kg in weight… so a diet worth following for anyone who has time to row the atlantic.

The first lesson she learnt from this massive task was, as the leader of the team, she should have asked everyone how they felt. She assumed everyone was as enthusiastic and positive as she was at the start…but in retrospect that might not have been the case.

The technology helped in the first instance by having a GPS tracking beacon that allowed Sarah and her mum at home and Ricardo in Australia and other supporters around the globe to track her and see, unfortunately, that due to currents and wind directions, she spent 10 days rowing in an enormous circle.

Positive thinking helped here… she decided that that was not a failure, but a ‘warm up lap’.

The second attempt, one week later, was more successful…and still an odd challenge given that Sarah was frightened of deep water and didn’t want to have to swim under the boat to scrape the barnacles of the bottom. She made friends with some local fish though, which she ended up speaking to as the great technology of the satellite phone proved too expensive to use often.

Second question to ask her team: how do we measure progress?

After spending 40 days to reach what should have taken a week, since she kept getting blown back towards Australia and spent eight hours a day trying to stay still, Sarah heard Ricardo suggesting she rowed forty miles due west where the weather was better. However, she was unable to row closer to Mauritius and unable to row closer to the better weather. So, how do you measure progress?

She decided it was progress if she got to the end of another day.

Lesson two: set reaslistic goals when working with virtual teams and accept that what might seem simple to you might be near impossible for the person on the other side of the world.

The third question she asked herself was: how do you keep people motivated in virtual teams?

“If you have lemons, make lemonade!”

Look for the albatrosses that might illuminate your day…look for the good when everything is bad…look for

Two storms colliding and Sarah had to try and row 20 hours a day to get out of the centre of it.

Imagine waves as tall as the Ashridge steeple.
Imagine wanting to stay in your cabin all the time and hide from the storm, which is big and scary and throws you around.

Would you want to go out and row and be in the storm that is big and scary and throws you around?

Individual choices…Sarah went out to try and do something…and while nipping back in the cabin for a moment, Sarah’s boat got capsized.

She floated in the salt water, trying to hold her breath, desperately hoping that the boat woiuld right itself as it was supposed to.

The boat did turn the right way up again. Life ain’t so bad after all, even if she was hanging off the side of the boat by her lifeline with huge waves crashing over her.

Eventually, she got through to Ricardo who thought – on her capsizing – that it would probably have refreshed her!

All told she spent over four months rowing in a long doodle of a route that did its utmost to avoid any straight lines – what can you do with the wind? But Sarah managed – against the odds – to close to Mauritius and began to talk to her team and a Mauritian friend to try and arrange the arrival.

She needed a pilot to guide her over the reef for the final stretch.

The pilot only had a rubber dingy that was not allowed to go past the reef.

There was no plan B.

Unfortunately, Sarah was rowing through large waves that meant the support boat couldn’t find her. The boat capsized twice more over the reef…and Sarah decided she needed to get inside the cabin. As she was entering, another wave came, half-flooded the cabin and capsized the boat again.

Not a good place to be.

Sarah made a MayDay call, but only got silence. She tried the satellite phone. No answer. She used flares. She saw three flshes that said ‘help is coming’ – but was it three flashes or was it a tree swaying infront of a street lamp on shore?

The helicopter finally got her off the boat, and she finally met Ricardo…who – communication problems apart – had helped her across the ocean and whom she trusted completely.

Final message? Sarah gives some take-aways…

Lessons from the Ocean

• Defined goals and secondaries
• Clear systems and contingencies
• Progress and praise and follow up
• Know thyself, know thy team
• Strong leadership
• Attitude
• Energy
• Trust, respect, value

The positive attitude is essential. If the team is not on the same page, they won’t get to the end of the book. Sarah is planning to row around the world, but is choosing a team only of people who are positive that the project can be achieved.

Finally, communication is essential – say what you mean and mean what you say.

You can follow Sarah at: www.sarahouten.co.uk or on Twitter @sarahouten