A short talk by Adam Markel using his lifeguard experience as a metaphor for 'pivotability' and self-disruption. He describes large, high-stakes beach environments with rip currents ('sucks') and explains how lifeguards proactively disrupted the environment (whistles, flags, buoys, ropes, surfboards) to prevent drownings, emphasizing innovation, anticipation, and taking charge of change rather than waiting for it.
Chapters
So after accountability comes pivotability, and pivotability is really crucial here. And I'm going to share just a couple of things from the beach so you guys can see what pivotability looked like. So, first of all, I was. I didn't give you a lot of details about what a beach scene for me, looked like back then. 19 years old on the beach. There's. This is what it looked like on a Saturday or Sunday. This is actual picture. 100,000 patrons on that beach. You could barely see between them. And when the rip currents, when the riptides, when the sucks, as we used to call them, were raging, it was very possible for people to go down in our water. We made hundreds of rescues every single day when those waves were big, and we didn't lose anyone. Seven summers that I worked at that beach, we never lost anyone. How did we do it? We're gonna go ahead and play a little video for you. Just show you a couple of clips of what it actually looked like. Then what you can see right here are lifeguards that are going out to a man that is having trouble. You can see he's struggling just a little bit. His arms are flailing. How many lifeguards are out there now? Here comes another one. Look at this. This time with a buoy, but we're not done yet because that man not going to be so easy to get in because he's panicking. He's a big guy, too. So they run a line out to him, and they got somebody on the shore that's manning that line, pulling in the line, getting him in. You think he's safe right here? Right? Well, watch yourself. Just when you think nothing else can happen, there's not another change, another disruption, there's another disruption. Here's the thing about this. We were in charge, or at least our. Our intention was that we were going to be in charge of the disruption on the beach. That was the only thing we could control. You see, those rip currents would appear and then disappear. We knew, and I'm going to show you in a second a video of what it looked like from the lifeguard stand. We could actually tell from the color of the water whether or not there was a rip current that was moving parallel to the shore and people were going to be in trouble. We had, like 10 lifeguards. You get 100,000 people on the field, how on earth are you going to be there for all of them? Well, I'll tell you one thing. You don't wait for disruption to happen. We're talking about environment here, a high stakes environment. You self disrupt that environment. This is going to be very impactful for some of you in your businesses because too many people are playing safe, playing on defense, not wanting disruption, resisting it, resisting change. Change was everywhere on that beach. It's everywhere in nature all the time. It's a great teacher. So we would disrupt the environment. We would blow our whistles. Those whistles were powerful. One whistle was meant to get someone's attention. So we blew one sharp whistle. It was an attention getter. We blew one longer whistle. It was meant to move people. We move them sideways, move them in, move them out. We put flags up. Two whistles meant there was a rescuing process. Let's play this next video. You guys are going to get to see exactly what this looks like. So two whistles are blown right here. You could see that person. You could see the color of the water has changed. It's bit green and blue around, but in that spot right there you can see where the rip current is. And the reason the water changes color, by the way, and goes to that color brown is because the sand is being churned up. The sand is spinning and being sucked out. That's why we call them sucks. And so in that moment, a person might be standing in two or three feet of water and just enjoying the day. The next thing you know, they're 10 yards offshore and it's 10ft of water. And now they're panicking. And if you wait, if we waited for the disruption to happen, that person was down in that murky water, very difficult to find them. So we were always innovating or improvising, I'll say using anything at our disposal, buoys, ropes, whistles, flags, anything that we could use, surfboards, boats, to be able to serve in that way in business, it can look a little differently.
