Image of someone pondering the idea of adventure

Why Adventure?

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3 reasons …

  1. Adventure, as a metaphor, describes the future we are all facing – the territory is unknown, wild, rapidly changing, treacherous, but with amazing things to see and experience
  2. Adventure reflects the mindset that we need to develop if we are to give ourselves the best opportunity of not only surviving this future, but thriving in it
  3. ‘Adventure’ is something that resonates with us. From childhood, it is a vocabulary that taps into our spirit. Into dreams, resources and values that reflect an aspiration. For many of us, it is something we wanted for ourselves ‘when we grew up’. And now  … We have grown up, and we need to repossess that child inside before they are permanently lost to us.

We are all on an adventure …

Life IS an adventure. The choices we make within that adventure impact how we experience it and our ability to influence it for good.
Staying the same is a decreasingly tenable option; one that puts us at a significant disadvantage and under a lot of stress.
Leading by Adventure is about how we engage and shape our adventure more proactively. Experimenting with how we engage with it, and using those experiments to deepen our understanding and insight into ourselves and into the nature of our adventure (and team). The adventure is different for each one of us.

About the future …

In the future, more and more of what we currently do will be automated and handled by Artificial Intelligence. It is tempting to look at our roles and say computers will never do that, or it won’t be economic, or people won’t accept it. But take a look back over some of the automation you are seeing around you. Would you have though the same about some of those things a decade or two ago?  Even where automation seems unlikely, we see the World adapt to make it possible. And this is a good thing. It is good to see freedom from mindless repetitive tasks. It frees us up to do more creative, relational, human things.
And key to this will be individual creativity and continuous learning. It is about doing things that machines cannot do.
The purpose of this series is to put you back in touch with those things, and to expand your capabilities within them.

Your challenge …

Your challenge – should you choose to accept it – is to implement at least one of the challenges each month. We make no promises (we cannot, the adventures are yours and yours alone). The purpose of the adventures is simply to provide the opportunity to take your perspective to different places, and to enable you to make informed choices about what you would like to do about the view. Some of the places may be a bit of a struggle to get to, but that is part of the exercise. To encourage you in this, we might suggest you take 10 minutes to watch Carol Dweck’s excellent TED talk on Growth Mindset.
The key question for you is, are you willing to commit (to yourself) to pitch your creativity against the unknown (the tasks)? To find some way to look differently and still get value out of it? And confront your existing patterns, go somewhere else, and see if you like it?

Including your team …

We would encourage you in the first instance to take this journey alone. However, if you have a team, you may at some point find that you want to use some of the resources to stretch their thinking. This could happen individually, or as a team.
If you want them to engage as a team, we suggest you hand-pick certain exercises which you are confident will move you all forward as a team. Ensure you have clear goals for the difference you want to achieve through the exercise, and explain this to them before you start. Explain, what you are preparing them for and why.
If you want them to engage individually, please bear in mind that everyone has their own adventures. It will only work if they are committed to use the adventures on their own behalf. Therefore take the time to explain why, what you are getting from it, and the difference that you hope they will be able to get from it. Help them develop their own vision for how they would like ‘future me’ to be different.
There is a lot of value in sharing your journey with others, learning from and encouraging each other. Whether or not you manage to enlist those around you, please help us by engaging with our on-line communities. Post your own experiences ( include #LeadingbyAdventure in your post) and read those of others, at:

Staying on track …

“Why in all the plenitude of God’s great universe do you choose to fall asleep in this small dark prison?”
With this pithy question, Rumi speaks so insightfully of the human condition. Our thinking is limited by walls (paradigms) all around us. But we often do not see them, because they give us comfort – they enable us to coast where we are – we can fall asleep within them. We hope these adventures will help you face some of those walls and knock holes in them.
You will of course find other walls a bit further out, but all the time your thinking has greater freedom and space to roam.
But, to quote Thomas Jefferson, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. The price of stopping the walls from creeping back in is to keep doing exercises that maintain your wider awareness, and keeps your perspectives open.
And, lets face it, we all know how easy it is to fall asleep. How many things have you started with the best of intentions, and then woke up three months later wondering why it stopped?
It happens to all of us. So if you are serious about this, can I suggest some strategies that will help you to retain vigilance if you need it.

  • Firstly, create a picture of how you want to be ‘different’ in six months time, and send it to your future self using https://www.futureme.org/ or  https://theself.club/future-self/
  • Plan time into your calendar – whether it is for this programme or something else – weekly, monthly – to give yourself space to invest in yourself in this way
  • Set a phone alarm, or an Evernote alarm, or some other sort of digital alarm 6 months into the future,
  • Make sure the weekly emails from Leading by Adventure appear in your inbox. Sort out the issues if they don’t. And promise yourself to ALWAYS open them
  • Set yourself review points, where you can be honest about whether you are maintaining your commitment to develop yourself
  • Select an friend to keep you real – set an appointment in their calendar