JUMP!

Look Within … Leap Beyond

Close your eyes and envision yourself standing on the threshold of an open aircraft door over two miles above the earth. The cool, turbulent air thunders inside the plane as you peer over the edge down through the mixture of blue sky and clouds to the patchwork of ground below. As you prepare to take the leap, you look within yourself and are confronted by the intense anxiety of the unknown.

Are you fully prepared and trained? Was your parachute packed properly? Will you actually summon the courage to jump from the airplane? Can we draw parallels from this experience to business? Is your organization facing significant challenges and obstacles? Are you and other co-workers required to step outside your comfort zone, to drive innovation and improvement? Does any of this sound familiar?

Perception is reality

Before we examine the many powerful parallels between business and skydiving, let’s look at the activity itself for a moment. For the average person, jumping from an airplane appears to be sheer madness. The roots of this very commonly held perception are derived in part from the biplane barnstorming days of the early 1900s, when daredevils jumped from these WWI aircraft and promoters sensationalized it as a death-defying activity to draw larger crowds.

This perception was and still is reinforced every time a newspaper article runs an article about another crazy skydiver who is seriously injured or killed in this seemingly reckless activity. The average person laments the apparent lack of even average intelligence it must take to call this activity a sport. It appears that every skydive is a fateful flip of the coin between life and death.

It’s All Relative

A few statistics for you to consider: Each year there are over two million sport skydives conducted in the United States. Of these jumps, on average there are typically fewer than thirty fatalities reported annually to the United States Parachute Association. In fact, there were only twenty-one in 2004. A fraction of these involve first-jump students; the large majority comes from experienced skydivers. Based on these figures, the odds of you making one of the annual two million jumps and being involved in a fatal incident is roughly 1 in 66,667.

Compare to other activities

Contrast these facts with your average commute to and from work and the possibility that you might be involved in a car accident resulting in serious injury or death. Further, consider how often you are confronted with automobile accidents in the newspaper, on TV, or even as you drive by in the perceived safety of your own car. According to U.S. DOT statistics, there are on average over six million automobile crashes every year in the United States; three million involve injured persons and result in more than 40,000 fatalities.

Watch your step

In a 2002 study released by the U.S. National Safety Council (NSC) titled “What Are the Odds of Dying?” the NSC determined that you have a 1 in 77 chance of expiring in a transportation accident in the average human life span. More surprising, you have a 1 in 229 chance of killing yourself by slipping, tripping, or stumbling. We sometimes joke to our skydiving students that the last step is a long one, but even the short ones we take for granted have very real risks associated with them.

It’s human nature to maintain false perceptions

Because we have been so immersed in the imagery and frequency of automobile accidents, we have become either numb to it or we accept it as a necessary risk of daily life. I have been parachuting for over twenty years and have accumulated thousands of jumps; I have never had a broken bone for any reason. The odds are heavily in your favor to make at least one skydive and survive unscathed. I know this is all very morbid, but I have to confront you with the hard facts.

My point is not really to convince you to skydive as much as to question whether your current perceptions are holding you back.

This is important because we as humans have a tendency to fabricate our own reality. If we are going to drive increases in organizational performance and teamwork, we must first open our minds to new performance-enhancing opportunities. These opportunities cannot be discovered and exploited with a closed mind and narrow perceptions.