Episode 31 | GAVIN BATE | Mountain Guide | Entrepreneur | Charity Founder

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Hi, and welcome to this episode of the Inspiring Change Podcast. Something a little bit different different in this episode. My guest this week is a travel company owner. He owns a company called Adventure Alternative. He's a mountain leader who has summited all the Seven Summits in the world, some multiple times, and he also founded a charity for which I was the chairman in Ireland a number of years ago, a charity by the name of Moving Mountains. His name is Gavin Bate. I've known Gavin for about, gosh, nearly, sorry Gavin, 20 years now, and I thought it would be a really interesting discussion to have to bring some of Gavin's experiences from his mountain, from his charity work, and from his role as a mountain leader to bear and see how perhaps that translates into the whole area of leadership and communications in business. So Gavin, good morning.

Good morning, Scott.

Great to have you on.

Thank you, thank you. I've been looking forward to this, um, just to, uh, spend some time chatting to you and hopefully go through some, some old stories together.

Brilliant. And of course, you're just back from the High Atlas in Morocco, where you've been, you've been building a school for, for Muslim girls, which is amazing.

Yes, um, with, uh, 71 school pupils from about 18 different countries, so, uh, logistically quite, um quite demanding. It was the highest village in the Atlas, but found it kind of, from a kind of personality point of view of the trip, it was really fascinating meeting all these young people from so many different countries.

Brilliant, brilliant. So listen, why don't we start with, with the usual easy question that I start with on these podcasts and perhaps give the listeners a bit of a sense of you, where you've come from, your background, maybe some of your achievements and your role today.

Well, I was born in England, and the family joke is that when I, when I was born, I abseiled out of my mum and unclipped and walked away.

That doesn't surprise me.

From a very young age, I was extremely independently minded and always kind of active in the outdoors and so on. And my father was a very unorthodox person. He was a real non-conformist, and he taught me from a very young age to, to really question things, to always question the orthodoxy. And I've taken that with me throughout my whole life. And his non-conformity, and my parent, my mum as well, led to them giving me the chance to leave home actually at 14 and grow up with family friends in Australia. So I spent my early teenagehood in living in Western Australia, which was about as outdoorsy as you can get. And then after that, um, I came back and went to university in Belfast in Northern Ireland. And then literally the day after graduating— it was the day after— I hitched down to Piraeus in Greece. I got on board a ship and worked my way to China and then hitched through from China back to Ireland, and all that took about a year. And I came back to Ireland and there was no work. It was— this was in the kind of late '80s, mid-'80s, and I just, I just thought, well, I just have to go away traveling again. And I had these tremendously itchy feet, which then took me on about 11 years of constant traveling, mostly in developing countries and mostly in Africa, India, Nepal, and a little bit of Southeast Asia. And during those times, I had really lots and lots and lots of different jobs and different roles and different experiences. I was extremely opportunistic and still am, really. I, I just, I just always want to see what will happen if I say yes to something. I very rarely say no to something because you never know what the intangible benefits are going to be to an opportunity or a chance meeting or, or someone you meet or whatever. And over that period, I built up these, these different companies, these Adventure Alternatives in 8 now, and, uh, and the charity as well. Um, so lots and lots of different companies and organizations and charities and aid agencies that I worked for in my youth, and kind of all those strands kind of intertwined eventually to form, you know, what I have now. And, and now I'm a father of two young children, and we live in a, in a kind of idyllic forest down in southwest England, very much kind of off-grid, living off the land, I suppose. And I run my companies and the charity, and I spend a lot of time with my children, and I do a lot of work with leadership, and I do a lot of work with companies and business schools around the concept of leadership, and to me it's just interesting that there is this need, there is this absolute need for tactics and strategies and ways in which to cope with such a fast-changing world.

And of course, much of your thinking around leadership— and we've had numerous discussions about this, Gav— much of your leadership thinking has come from your experience, both of the travel, also of the charity, but also of your mountain climbing experience.

Yes, the mountain climbing has always been my biggest passion. It's the kind of the rat that gnaws at my gut, and I can't get away from it. It is who I am, and I'm not pretending to be a fantastic mountaineer. I just absolutely love it, and I love the wilderness. I love the kind of the solitude of it, and obviously the connection with nature. And I'm kind of— I'm less convinced about the, the kind of athletic achievements of climbing mountains. For me, that's not really the issue. For me, it is really about getting in touch with yourself and nature and wilderness and kind of testing yourself in a more holistic way. And obviously nowadays people run up mountains, climb up mountains, and they do it for all sorts of reasons. I'm less convinced that you can anthropomorphize a mountaintop in order to kind of deal with some personal problems in life. For me, it has always been just that desire to be in the wilderness.

Yeah, I think in many ways, you know, we spend a lot of time these days talking about kind of presenteeism and mindfulness, and I think that the whole idea of mountain climbing is a very nice way to to show that, that it's much, much less about the destination, the summit, whether that be an Everest or a Kilimanjaro, that it's more about the journey, or should be more about the journey, and that translates very nicely, I think, into life as well.

Oh, absolutely, and most of life is not a mountain that you climb. Most of life is flat and it just carries on and there isn't an obvious kind of point on the horizon. And you have to kind of, you have to dream them up and you have to generate self-motivation. And life is hard for a lot of people. Life is very, very hard. And the idea of talking about inspirational summits to reach and so on, it is in many ways patronizing to those people who are just simply struggling to pay the mortgage or something and just getting on by. And, you know, having children has made me realize that so so much more. I mean, how kind of in admiration and awe I am of single mums, for example, and so on. It's difficult out there. It's interesting what you said about mindfulness, because nowadays— I mentioned about the group I was taking, these school pupils out to Morocco. The most common reason I get asked to take school groups away now is to take them offline and to basically tackle that issue of mindfulness and mental health and mental wellness, because so many young people now are kind of affected by this, what we now understand are the side effects of social media and this kind of addiction to yourself. So I commonly get asked, take this group away, to a remote place in the wilderness and just get them to sit down and talk to each other. And it's interesting that the great irony is our interconnected world, what people want now is for us to take our young, our children to the most unconnected world and just sit down and learn the basics.

Yeah, for me, it's fantastic that we've realized that that's a problem, equally and probably more actually, not even equally, more sad that it actually is a problem and a thing that needs to be addressed. It's shocking.

Absolutely, and we now have, I mean, my children go to forest school, which never existed 20 years ago, but now we have to have a forest school to take children into the forest where they can stimulate their own imagination. I don't know whether you had that with your own children, Scott, but it's just ironic that we have to create an environment where that exists, whereas I, I was brought up where, and I'm sure you were too, where you could just kind of go off by yourself in the day and just play in the woods or whatever safely, and, uh, or with your mates. And, um, we have to, we have to contrive that now. It has to be created.

Back then it was called childhood, uh, right now it's called summer camp.

Yes. And it's interesting that that desire is not just for young people, it's, it's for adults as well. I don't know whether historically it's something linked to our general decline in faith, uh, nationally and internationally, or whether— but I just see there's this kind of hole, there's this kind of black hole in people, and they're looking to fill it. And they might well fill it by going and climbing a mountain, and on that experience they will find out a little bit about themselves, and it's, it's kind of addictive. And therefore, the people I take away commonly will come on multiple trips, and they're looking to kind of just recreate that sense of self in an environment where, well, where you're away from all of the pressures and the technology of our modern world.

So on the subject of, of looking at oneself and climbing mountains, you've got quite the CV Everest you've been on 6 times and summited once, Cho Oyu, Aconcagua, um, Mount Denali in Alaska, Elbrus, you've been up Kilimanjaro 53 times, Mount Kenya 46 times. It's quite the climbing CV, and I wonder from all of that experience what your views are on what makes a leader a great leader.

Well, first of all, all of those experiences kind of if you kind of distill them all down, it comes out with that famous but almost biblical phrase, "Know thyself." I simply couldn't have the temerity to stand in front of a group of business people or whoever and purport to offer some advice if I didn't know myself. And you mentioned all those mountain trips, but the single trip which was the benchmark for me and absolutely absolutely kind of forced me into understanding about myself was when I was 21 and I walked across the Sahara Desert on my own. And that was 6 months and over 2,500 kilometers, pretty much completely by myself. And in that trip, I learned about the kind of thin line between sanity and insanity. I really had nobody to to bounce my thoughts off at all. It was really foolish looking back on it now. I was really lucky to make it out, and I went through an emotional breakdown at the end of it. But when I look back at that, I understand that it was the foundation for everything that followed. And this idea of know thyself is, I think, very, very important. But perhaps nowadays people don't have the time and the space and the freedom to know thyself. Because if you're a millennial and you've just come out of university with a £50,000 debt, you just don't have the time to go off, you know, bumming around the world for 3 years. You've got to get on that ladder. And, uh, more and more I see this, this kind of impatience, uh, with getting on, and less of an ability to, to just kind of do nothing. For a little bit and just explore yourself through experiences. And in terms of what makes a great leader, I mean, know thyself is— it just sounds almost a bit kind of silly to say it, but I think it's absolutely, absolutely vital. And to have the kind of— from there you have this kind of self-belief, which I other people recognize. And I think it becomes kind of part of your character, and you can then take that and instill it into other people. And if we accept that leaders are most effective when they can induce followers, if you like, to see the group's interest as their own interest, then, then you can be a great leader. And that's not something that is just inherent in all of us. There are absolutely, in my opinion, there are absolutely tactics and ways in which to achieve that. So, so the first point is know thyself, and the second point is this ability to induce followers to see the group's interest as your own interest. So, um, We have to accept that not everybody's going to be a great leader, but everybody has the ability to be a leader. And it's interesting, if you look at mountain guide training, um, 20 years ago, 75% of mountain guide training was hard skills and 25% was soft skills. And now, 2019, 75% are soft skills— psychology, really— and 25% are hard skills. And a lot of that 75% is spent in learning tactics to understand people in such a way as to induce them to kind of see the group's interest as your own interest.

And I've seen you do that in real time when we were on Kilimanjaro on that trip in 2004, and one of the group was scared of heights. We were bringing her up Lava Tower and I was going to chat to her because she was scared of heights and you just came to me and said, "Go on, carry on, I'll do this." And it was just kind of taking over the situation and she got to the top and she got to the top and she was so proud of the fact that she'd gotten there and she'd gotten there because of your support and that psychology piece and that coping mechanism piece and all the things you just talked about.

And in a mountain scenario, the added frisson to the whole dynamic is fear, which you don't necessarily have in the office, at least I hope not for most people. But on a mountain or in a desert or in the jungle or whatever, on a trip, you have that added kind of aspect of fear. And for most people, overcoming fear is, is, is a— it can be a really life-changing experience. It can really It can really change people, and they can take that process of fear. The example you've just given, for example, which was, let's say, a fear of heights, of vertigo, you could say that that was a fear of doing something new. It was a fear of getting kind of beyond your comfort zone into something new and daring and challenging and ambitious. So you come out of that experience having completed it, you've done it, you look back at the mountain on the way to the airport with this kind of proud smile, a sense of kind of, you know, almost now, you know, you've become a new person. You look at it with different eyes, and you can take that knowledge and experience to something like the workplace, and you can apply a new, really, a new motivation, a new sense of positivity. And, you know, obviously this idea in psychology that men generally overestimate their abilities, and women can underestimate their abilities. So on a mountain, on an expedition, you're really, as a leader, you're, you're dealing with both those dynamics and those, both those psychologies. And ultimately, um, it boils kind of down to ego. Um, and, and, and in the guide training that we, that we do, a lot of it is about Understanding ego and how ego plays a part in damaging teams or making them, and how, uh, those different aspects of kind of characteristics that men and women have, um, can, can come together to create an optimal compromise. And guides talk about optimal compromises all the time. You're effectively dealing with this kind of this level of uncertainty, this kind of inevitable change that's going to happen in everything from the weather to the health of the group to all the kind of the assets and liabilities of an expedition are all constantly moving. And as a guide, you've got to— as a leader, you've got to kind of look at that and draw from it an optimal compromise. And ultimately, that can mean managing egos And therefore, I believe that as a leader, you have to divest yourself of that egocentricity. And we talk about transformational leadership, where instead of standing at the front of the group like some, uh, autocratic leader, you position yourself in the middle of the group and you allow everybody else their moment of leadership. You give them their chance and you step in where it's necessary, where you particularly have the skills and the knowledge to, in my case, perhaps to save a life or to ensure that the group is safe. But in a work environment, to kind of give people their space. And unfortunately, most business models are really hierarchical. You have this kind of top-down model where, you know, the CEO or the line manager or departmental manager or whatever is kind of psychologically primed to kind of give commands and orders, and people below, kind of middle management or whatever, they're kind of psychologically primed to just listen and never question. And I think that's inhibiting.

I completely agree, and it doesn't allow you to get the most out of people. And actually what it does also is stop the the business being the best business it could be, because it's effectively, it's holding people back. It's holding back ideas and thinking and input, because oftentimes people are too scared, or the culture or the business model just doesn't allow that stuff to bubble up, that really useful feedback. So I think that whole idea of planting yourself in the middle of a group, whether that be in a work setting or on the side of a mountain, is absolutely key. And I think that certainly for me, and again I've seen this on many trips that I've been with, with you on and others, it's almost the people at the front don't know they're leading. It's almost, it's so natural that suddenly they're in charge and they don't really know they are, and that's powerful.

And one of my jobs a long time ago was I used to teach cold weather survival skills to people in the TA, in the army, and we went to Scotland and Norway and so on. And I really, I really didn't get on with it because the army works understandably on a very hierarchical basis. You follow your orders, you know, you jump, they ask you to jump, you ask how high. Whereas I was going on these cold mountains with these troops who were in their different order of rank, from kind of private up to majors and and corporals and so on. But what I would inevitably find out was that the, the officer quite often had the least knowledge managing a cold environment. And it might be that the, the private over there, or the gunner, or someone like that, who effectively had little voice in the decision-making process, actually had a lot of knowledge to put into that. But that idea of meritocracy really doesn't work in, in an army environment. And one of the things I like best about expeditions is the fact that they take people out of their normal environment. They remove that armor that we have, that the suits and ties and shoulder pads that we— that people wear, their armor, and it puts them onto a level playing field. And it creates this kind of blank canvas, really. And on that blank canvas, you you now have to play your part. And one of the things about expeditions, whether it's polar or mountain or whatever, is that it's very hard to hide. You can't pretend, and you can't go home at 5 o'clock. You have to sleep in a tent with those people, and you can't hide yourself. So you are who you are, who you are, and therefore it's a very intense experience. And I really, really enjoy that. And again, my role is to help the group create this optimal compromise where productivity, if you like, or performance, or in my case, safety and so on and so on, are achieved. And we all get through the experience without losing fingers or whatever like that. But we reach a level of kind of performance as a team. And it's my job to try and do that, and I can only do that through example in many cases. And one of the best examples is to remove the egocentricity from it all. And that is difficult, actually. It's a hard thing to do because you're dealing with people, aren't you? And people like to talk. They like to have their voice heard first. They like to be, you know, top of the heap, and they like to, you know, it's less, you know, it's kind of, it's difficult to kind of create that, what's the word, well it is a compromise, I was thinking of another word, I'll come back.

It is compromise, it is finding a comfortable middle ground, and I think as you said there, the optimal compromise, but people don't necessarily want to do that because, as you say, they want to be top dog or top doggess in some cases.

And one of the most dangerous conditions that you find yourself in, I suppose, in the workplace as well as on an expedition is where you have— where people react to damaging kind of stereotypes. And the workplace at the moment is full of talk about generational stereotypes, the way people judge each other according to the decade they were born in. The internet is absolutely full of how difficult people find it to get on with each other because the problem with this multi-generational kind of stereotype is that it's become self-fulfilling. So if you're a millennial and you read about millennials being ABCD and kind of difficult to deal with and so on, then you you find yourself being like that. And yet, actually, millennials are the most represented demographic in the workforce. And if you're a baby boomer, you know, or you're Generation X and talking about work-life balance all the time, it's hard to break through those stereotypes and navigate them. But on an expedition, you can, because it's a blank canvas.

Let me go back to something that you touched off of briefly a second ago, Gavin, and that was change. And I wonder, you know, what skills and thinking can leaders take from expedition leadership, particularly around leading through change? Because I guess, you know, it doesn't have to be an Everest or a Cho Oyu or an Aconcagua. It could be a Mount Kenya or an Elbrus, a lower mountain, but things change all the time. I remember that when we were on Elbrus and it was -25, which 35-mile-an-hour winds and snow so thick you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. You've got that to play with, plus all the people stuff. So I just wonder, what are some of the learnings, do you think, that could come from the side of the mountain into the boardroom in terms of leading through change?

Yeah, it's a really good question, and I think that the skills that you're talking about on an expedition are becoming ever more relevant in today's world. In the world. And I'll give you a kind of comparison between me and my brother. So I've trained as a professional mountain leader for many, many years now, and our training, as I said, is 75% soft skills, and it's all about adaptability. My brother is a pilot. Now, his training is a lot of hard skills, and the way that he's taught is to deal with certainty. He wants certainty on an airplane, and he's taught by rote, basically, to deal with any scenario by repeating it over and over and over and over and over again in a simulator. So any situation, he's almost acting instinctively to deal with that scenario, whereas my job is all about adapting to shifting circumstances and shifting situations. So if we look at how we measure people in the workplace. Traditionally, we've always known about IQ, this idea of kind of how smart we are, and kind of based on our background, whether we're Ivy League or, or whatever our qualifications, it's kind of a standardized measurement of somebody's ability. And if you go to a job interview, you probably will be measured on IQ at some point. And then, and then we look at EQ, which is this kind of emotional, uh, social quotient, which is kind of how well does this person build teams, what kind of rapport will they have with our clients and people in the office and so on. And we've known about that for some time. I would suggest that adaptability is the thing that I look for most when I'm trying to teach people on mountains. I do a lot of mentoring now of mountain leaders. In effect, how well does this person react to the to the inevitability of change, and lots of it as well. So I think that AQ, adaptability quotient, is a kind of form of intelligence. But the great thing about it is it can be learned and it can be tested and it can be measured, and I think it's useful for all of us. So that adaptability is the, for me, the most fundamental quality that a mountain guide would look for, an expedition leader, and I think it transposes perfectly in today's workplace. And if you want, we can talk about how I, you know, how I kind of delve into that adaptability.

Yeah, go for it.

And I suppose there are 3 things, I just noted them down here when I was thinking about talking with you today, Scott, and the first thing is that If you deal in what-if scenarios, then you're much more likely to be able to kind of force multiple versions of the future. And when we do our guide training, we constantly, constantly, constantly deal with scenarios. The exam is all about scenarios. What if, what if, what if, what if we had a heat wave and your shop store shut down today? Or that something happened, how would you react to that? And what would be your kind of list of multiple, you know, your versions of how you might deal with that scenario? I think that says a lot about people. So I think instead of— how to put this— instead of testing how you take in and retain information, which might be an IQ test, it tests more about how you manipulate manipulate information in order to attain a goal. And that is what we do on mountains all the time. And it comes to a point where you kind of instinctively, you're constantly manipulating a set of data, which is always changing. And as you go higher up the mountain or you come across different scenarios, that manipulation, well, you know, it could be the difference between life and death. I'm not being dramatic in saying that, but it could be, yeah, that, that situation. So I did, um, a couple of trips leading people to the North Pole, and, uh, you know, that, that process of scenarios is something that I actually wrote down on a daily basis in my tent. I would sit down and I'd write lists, and I would write pros and cons, and I would look— I would take all the data I had, and I would look at it and I would say, what's my best, um, what's my best, um, action here in order to get us, you know, through the next day? And I think the other thing on the back of that is this idea of unlearning. Um, and, uh, unlearning for me is— and I have to say, when I look back on what my dad did with me as a child, I mentioned he was quite non-conformist I kind of see what he was trying to do. He was, he was teaching me to, to challenge, um, what I already knew and, and to, and to kind of override that data with new information. Um, and if you see, you know, if, if you're too set in your ways and you take, you know, what you know as being the default kind of, um, way of doing things instead of seeking to learn a bit more and kind of deliberately unlearning what you know, then I think it hinders that adaptability. Does that make sense?

Completely, absolutely. And I think that, you know, in the workplace you so often hear, well, we tried that before and it didn't work, or we'll keep doing it this way because this is the way we did it before and and it was perfect. And actually there's very little, I believe, adaptability and very little unlearning in the place of work generally. And there are definitely things that people could pick up and apply.

Yeah, we talk in guide training, we talk a lot about these heuristic traps. Have you come across them? These kind of shortcuts that your brain takes physiologically in order to kind of get through our day we, we take these little shortcuts with our brains. So if it's something that we're familiar with and we do time and time again, we'll just do it time and time again, and we won't think about that because if we did, we— life would be a lot slower. We just do them because they're familiar. And on a mountain, we're taught to question that. So let me give you an example, and it was actually an example that that led to a real tragedy in the Alps a couple of years ago whereby a guide was taking a group on a route that he had done, I mean, hundreds of times before. It was quite a standard normal route. It was— the weather was good, and off he went. He went up the path, it avalanched, and they all died. All of them. What he'd forgotten in his heuristic trap was, I've done this loads of times, so it must be okay. The heuristic trap was he just did it. What he forgot was that the night before there'd been some snowfall, the snow was loaded, they triggered an avalanche, and they all died. And it's that kind of unlearning that I'm talking about, that you question everything and you just seek to challenge what you already know, or what you presume you already know.

And I think that, that's it, that pulls us back to that very first point you made right at the top of the podcast, which for me is something that I talk to people about on training courses, or I talk about when I'm running meetings, is that whole idea of self-awareness and knowing thyself. And that idea that actually sometimes I have to stop myself from falling into that trap. Because when you take that example from the Alps and you translate that into the office, you know, every time a project comes up and somebody says, oh yes, we did something similar to that last last year, I'll just pull out the deck, I'll pull out the plan, I'll pull out the— and I shall just reapply. I'll just search replace the date and then reapply the plan, reapply the approach without stopping to think exactly as you said, what's changed, what's happened, are the people different, is the scenario different, is the context different, is the language different, the organization has moved on a year, so what do we have to think about there? And for me, half the time it's about actually stopping, just stopping and thinking, what do we need to do differently? Is it right to do exactly the same thing again? And you know what, maybe it is, and if it is, great, but maybe it isn't, and it probably isn't. So actually taking that time to stop and think and look and see— if there's been a bit of snow, you know, will there be an avalanche? Or if the CEO has changed, is this approach still the best approach to get people on board?— is critical, absolutely critical.

And that directly leads on to the last thing that I've written down here when I was thinking about expeditions, is this kind of natural tension between exploration and exploitation. And I think we overvalue exploitation. And what I mean by that is that we become too focused on exploiting an already successful business model. So much so that you can't see around the corner and avoid potential change, which we accept is happening all the time now. So here we are kind of stuck in our ways and we exploit what we know best, I suppose, just to keep the revenue coming in, just to keep everything, the status quo going. And we might be, for example, in a company where the finance team is just dealing with, you know, monthly, you know, your accounts every month and just keeping revenue and, and the balance sheet right, and, and, uh, the clients and suppliers that you just— you're just keeping that going. It's just exploiting that model and all the way down the line, but forgetting, um, that, that this previous success can actually become the enemy of your potential to adapt. And therefore, I would say that exploration is this kind of, um, it's this position of constantly seeking and never falling in love with your wins, but positively seeking out what might kill you next. And that is, when I say kill you, I'm putting myself in a mountain or polar environment. I'm always, I'm never sitting complacently. I'm always saying, well, what's going to kill us? What's the next thing that's going to hurt us? How am I going to deal with that? And that mentality is something I've grown up with, but I often see that it doesn't exist in the workplace.

And I think it translates beautifully into the workplace because we keep milking the cow until the cow dies, and then we go, hang on a minute, we need more cows. Well, there's no more cows. What do we do now? Um, I don't know. And then the business goes under. There was a really interesting film that I watched yesterday about a Dutch chemical company whose name can the name completely escapes me, but I'll put it up in the show notes. It was on YouTube. And basically, when the CEO took it over, he realized that they were just doing intolerable, unbelievable damage to the planet, that they were not a sustainable company, that they weren't focusing in the right areas, that they weren't doing the right thing. And he basically completely turned all of that around. So they didn't keep doing the same thing to keep the share price up, to keep the shareholders happy, to keep the markets happy. He said, I'm going down a different path with this organization. So that this company is here for tomorrow, so this company is here and doing something good today so that it can be here tomorrow. And the share price dipped and he was getting shouted at by shareholders at a shareholder meeting, and then one shareholder put their hand up and stood and said, "Sir, I completely believe in what you're doing and I think you are absolutely doing the right thing." And it was just a very— it was a 6-minute film, it was a very moving film, but it was exactly in that space that just let's stop, you know, what got us got us the success of today is not what's going to be getting us the success of tomorrow. And so I think exactly to your point, it's about having that realization.

And often large organizations exist in a kind of silo mentality whereby communication between departments and down the hierarchy from kind of top management down is often not meeting at all. It's just not meeting, and therefore you have to consciously make that happen. And this is, you know, we live in a kind of attention deficit economy. First of all, we can't concentrate on anything for more than 10 seconds unless it's in a tweet, and we can't have the time to sit down and just meet and talk and debate and kind of get a holistic view of things. So, I mean, there's so many classic examples of that, but I was doing a talk once for Shell in Rotterdam, one of their kind of big meets, and I was informed that in Shell there are two kind of halves of the company: upstream and downstream. And that kind of relates to the way in which oil is managed on a global scale. It's obviously a vast, vast kind of company, but upstream If you work for upstream, you never talk to people in downstream. If you work for downstream, you never talk to people in upstream. And therefore, this, this kind of ability to see the truth, I suppose, in the whole business is very difficult to achieve. Very difficult to achieve. And sometimes I work with companies who say to me, get us all onto a mountain together where we can just talk. And the classic one for me in that respect was at Nestlé on Mount Elbrus, where the CEO admitted to me that all of the personnel in his top management team— there's about 20 of them— literally couldn't talk to each other. They were all individually amazing people and with a huge amount of responsibility, but they couldn't talk to each other. So off we went, we climbed a mountain, and do you know when they actually really started to communicate with the other as human beings?

At the top?

No, it was at the bottom after summiting in the sauna, completely naked. Hilarious. And that was the moment when the CEO— I have to say he was quite a visionary, I was very impressed with him— the CEO stood or sat in that hot, stuffy little sauna, and he announced to his senior management team, 'Thanks for coming on this trip. I know it's been very hard. I know most of you didn't want to come here, but I'm here to tell you we're gonna take— do a takeover of Roundtree's.' Wow. And, um, you've, you've never heard such a kind of loaded silence. It was just incredible. It was such a moment. Having spent 2 weeks on this trip, going up and down this mountain, learning how to talk to each other, and then at the end of it, naked in the sauna, they were talking about this enormous strategic move in the company. It was really fascinating.

Funny, funny. Listen, we are nearly out of time, Gavin. I know that you and I could sit and talk. This could be like a 12-part, 3 hours per episode series of us just gassing, but I'm going to wrap it up shortly. One last question, before we go, a very, very quick question. What piece of leadership advice would you give to your 20-year-old self knowing what you know now? What would you have done differently?

Oh, get off your high horse.

Excellent.

I think that when you're that age, you just know it all, and you know, you've just got to kind of— I mean, It's an impossible piece of advice because everybody does it in their 20s and then they change in their 30s and you look back on yourself in your 20s and hold your head in shame and think, oh my God, what was I like? It's a lot about ego, isn't it? Just remember that you've got twice as many ears as you have mouths, and that means listen twice as much as you talk.

That's actually— some would suggest, Gavin, even to this day, that's advice that I could take. Well, not you, of course.

It's actually what my dad used to say to me, and I realize now it was his way of saying to shut up.

Yeah, politely.

But I remember him saying that to me, and it's funny how those little, those little kind of nuggets of wisdom that your parents give you, uh, end up defining you as a person in many ways. And I remember him saying, listen, don't just talk, just listen, um, and you'll, you'll get there. There and read a lot, read, read a lot, as much as you can. But yes, I would say, and I would say in terms of kind of advice for people generally in the workplace, and I really see this all the time and it's applicable to expeditions, is don't lower the goal, but raise the support and give people that sense of aspiration. But raise the support and involve people. Stay in the middle of your group and give people tasks and an identity. Create an identity around the finance team or the marketing team, but create an identity that is aspirational. But you can't always do that just from the front. You can do it very easily and equitably, actually, from the middle of the group. Give people a chance to speak their own voice.

Brilliant. Gavin, we're going to wrap it up there. We didn't get a chance at all to talk about the work that you did and do do, the amazing work with Moving Mountains, but if people want to learn more about that, they can go and have a look at movingmountainstrust.org. Some brilliant information there about all the projects that you guys run. And also from your perspective, I guess, if you want to learn more about Gavin, you can go and have a look at adventurealternative.com and all the information about the team and the trips they run, which are amazing, are up there. Gavin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been wonderful having the Famous Five-esque birds twittering and dogs barking in the background from the depths of the west of England. Thanks a million for coming on, it's been brilliant.

You're welcome, Scott, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Great stuff, listen, you have a great day.

Thank you, bye-bye.

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