You know that adrenaline rush base jumpers or speed skiiers get doing their thing?I get that rush just crossing the street safely.
Which is to say, I'm not an adventurer. Not in real-life anyway.
But as a kiddo, my most beloved video game was called Pitfall! (actual punctuation in the title – I'm not striving for drama here).
The game (dating myself much?) was played on the Atari console. And it was an absolute adventure. Albeit a lonely one. You were flying solo through a jungle full of pitfalls and gators. The obstacles felt unconquerable. And the threat of death was real.
But you'd play. And start to learn the tricks. To recognize the patterns and find the game's tells. And you'd figure out pretty quickly that the one thing never to do is stand still.
Do you see the metaphor coming a mile away? Yep – the workplace. It feels like that jungle right now. Lonely. Death-defying. Full of unconquerable traps.
It feels like those things. But in truth, it isn't.Many of us are feeling lonely for sure. But none of us is alone. Those insurmountable obstacles? Oh there are patterns and insights hiding in there. And that threat of death regularly triggering our fight-or-flight response? The kind meant to help us fend off the saber-tooths? That threat isn't real.
And when things feel this insurmountable and uncertain, our instinct, often, is to freeze. And wait and see.
But the only reality about Pitfall! that translates literally to work? Well, it's that standing still will be the thing that ends you.
So? What do we do with this?
Moving starts with understanding what's actually keeping us frozen. And it isn't the jungle. It's how we're showing up in it.
Like that loneliness. I mean, we're in back-to-back-to-back meetings all day. So how indeed are we, collectively, so lonely?
Lemme tell you. It's not about quantity. It's vibes.
Most of our meetings are really just negotiation. Updates, resources, timelines, deliverables. Necessary. But insufficient.
We're missing connection. I don't mean trust falls and pizza parties (though be my guest if they're your thing). I mean knowing who "our people" are – the sacred ones with whom we can get vulnerable. Share our challenges and uncertainties with – give and receive coaching from. The ones with whom we troubleshoot and problem solve without blame or accusation.
We need to seek the interactions that fuel us. And we absolutely need to make the time and space for these.
Then there are the obstacles themselves. We haven't really sat with them. We react and route around and complain but we don't investigate. Which decisions keep getting stuck and which sail through? What separates the proposals that land from the ones that don't? Which leaders advocate and which don't? The jungle had tells. So does yours.
And underneath all of it, the fear. That ever-present vigilance for the saber-tooth tiger? Good for neither human nervous systems nor business results.
We’ve gotta make peace with these realities. A risk to a deadline, a prediction whose target moved, an experiment that didn't yield the results we'd hoped for? These are inconvenient facts of working in uncertain times. They are not blood-thirsty predators. They're information. We've gotta start treating them that way.
This is the work of my Work Design Pulse Checks. They're not about overhauling or conquering the jungle. They're about bringing your team together to find the first few obstacles they're ready to tackle.
What's remarkable about these sessions isn't anything I bring. It's what the team is already sitting on.
In one recent Pulse Check, we learned from a struggling Marketing team that key members of the Development team had started opting out of their weekly project meetings. Turned out the Dev leader hadn't made it a priority. So things that were small risks were ultimately becoming big problems as the Developers weren't there to help problem solve. A quick conversation between the Marketing and Development leader delivered a huge win.
In another? A leader of a manufacturing team was struggling to "get his team on board with change." The leader was frustrated by their resistance and stubbornness. But what we discovered was that all of the hard details of the changes had been communicated. But there had been no real forum for questions, answers, explanations, assurances. Teams were sitting in a space of "is this memo really it?" And this session started a conversation between the leader and his team that remains ongoing and is driving engagement.
The pulse check is 90 minutes by design. Not to uncover everything. To find what's already clear to the people in the room and turn it into a few first steps.
In Pitfall! you don't have to resolve every obstacle at once. As soon as you get better at just swinging on the vine or leaping over the quicksand, you live longer.
That's how you conquer the jungle.
Related: When Leaders Admit Uncertainty, Teams Respond With Stronger Engagement and Trust