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The Big Themes
Roy
I’m ready to charge forth in pursuit of my mythic destiny and I can’t even get time off from work to do it.
Romeo
I’m no expert here, but it seems to me that the pursuit of a mythic destiny isn’t something that you need to get off a $7 an hour job in order to do.
From Tin Cup
I have filled much of the last twenty years thinking about four questions in different forms:
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What makes a great seller great?
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What makes a great service provider great?
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What makes a great leader great?
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What makes a great organization great?
Thinking about these questions puts me solidly in the company of about forty-eleven thousand other people, which suggests that I’m either not a terribly original thinker, or that these are big questions. Actually, if you wipe out the words “seller” and “service provider” you’ve now got an even simpler question: what makes a person great? Now you’ve got THE QUESTION.
Over the past six months or so I’ve become obsessed with the concept of the journey, more specifically the Heroic Journey as articulated most eloquently by Joseph Campbell. Here again, my new found interest puts me smack dab in the middle of a theme others have been thinking about for the last ten thousand years or so. I guess I should be asking myself what took me so long, but that’s another line of thinking.
As it turns out, “Journey” is a popular word in contemporary business discourse, as in “customer experience is a journey, not a destination.” Or “Our vision is to be nothing less than the premier provider of snorfblats; it’s a journey, not a destination.” Or any number of other lofty sounding proclamations that are intended to do one of three things:
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Absolve the speaker/writer of the need to actually achieve results in any reasonable time frame.
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Give weight and moment to an otherwise pedestrian objective.
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Acknowledge the underlying truth that anything worth doing will bring us face to face with hidden truths, profound meaning, uncomfortable realizations, vexing trials, and ultimately great victories, even if the journey appears to start out innocently enough.
I’d dearly like to think that those of us in business who use the word “journey” use it in the last sense, but that’s probably hoping for too much.
It is Campbell’s sense that mythic journeys are voyages of self-discovery. The epic tales that anchor every culture serve many purposes, the most important being a signal to us of what we ultimately need to do, and what to expect once we get at it.
We Use The Word, But What Does It Mean?
With that said, I’m convinced that the concept of The Journey in all its parts is a completely relevant framework for thinking about businesses, which after all are made up of people who are on their own journeys of self discovery, selling to customers who are also on their own journeys of self discovery.
In fact, I think it’s useful to think about how to intertwine what I call the “Four Journeys”: those of the organization, leadership, employees, and customers. Actually, it's not completely accurate to say that an organization goes on a journey because it has no soul or corpus independent of the people. But the firm or tribe is the bounding structure and entity and brings all those people together. To the extent that the individuals return to the whole with new insights and blessings from their own journeys, the collective whole journeys as well. So let’s include it.
So what are we actually talking about? Well, the classic heroic journey contains these components.
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Hero/Heroine: The person doesn't start out as a hero (even if he's already a king). He or she is just sitting around doing the daily do, reading the paper, tending the fields, whatever. It's the journey that does it. It’s the journey that makes the hero heroic.
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Ordinary World: The familiar surroundings, conventions, and behaviors of the every day world you live and work in.
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The Call to Adventure: You're challenged by something; the challenge means something is going to have to change. The call establishes the stakes of the game as well as the ultimate goal. The ordinary world just won't do it anymore.
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Refusal of the Call: It’s not uncommon for the initiate to do whatever it takes to avoid the call, ignore the frog in the well, wave off the gnarly old crone by the wayside, or follow habit and pattern when something odd crops up. And why not? The unknown is scary. Don't want to go. It's warm inside.
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Allies: Anyone or anything that pulls you through the refusal of the call and gets you started on the journey.
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Separation: Making the decision and committing your energies to the journey. In mythic terms, this is often expressed in terms of crossing a river, entering a forest, getting in a boat, or some other imagery that indicates that you’re not in Kansas anymore.
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Challenges: The parts that make the journey worth taking—that make it heroic—are the challenges that pop up to test your seriousness about making the journey and fetching the prize. The first one usually shows up right after you make your first commitment to the journey.
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Return: Coming back can be as hard as going out. Some heroes never come back. Some make it back and the ordinary world just doesn’t do the trick anymore. Some return only to find that the folks back home really aren’t interested in this great new discovery the hero has dragged back. A few make it back and stand astride the world of the ordinary and the extraordinary. It is at that point that the heroic journey becomes the tribal journey in that the boon or blessing brought back moves the world of the ordinary a bit closer to some super ordinate goal or state of being.
Still want to use the word “journey” to talk about your organization and its over-the-horizon objectives? The calculus is pretty simple. A “journeying” organization is one that is culturally tuned to encourage people to step up to opportunities to separate from the world of the ordinary, find some new boon or blessing, and bring it back to a the hosannas of an adoring throng.
Those journeys can go on down in finance, over in the call center, up in engineering, out in manufacturing, and most especially when and where the customer touches your organization. They go on anywhere you have engaged people who can and do heed the call to put the known, the routine, and the accepted practices aside to do what intuitively seems right, even if nobody understands why at the time. It is out of those intuitive leaps that greatness arises.
Boons? Blessings? Adoring throngs? If that’s not the environment you’re creating, if that’s not what it feels like when someone steps out and shows some initiative, you need to put that journey language back in the bag or risk the opprobrium reserved for yet another out of touch leader or hollowed out vision statement. There is no in between.
It is ultimately our individual destiny to journey. If you don’t make a place in your company for people to journey, they’ll do it elsewhere. All that brainpower, self-motivation, and meaning-seeking will leave the building at 5:00 and your organization won’t be the better for it. Without the individuals’ willingness to intertwine their journeys with that of the whole, there is not organizational journey.
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Kevin Hoffberg
Last modified:
05/03/06