"Better a live donkey than a dead lion..."

I have found significant value in studying the history of what the systems scientist, Barry A. Turner, called man-made disasters.  Man-made disasters are distinguished from natural disasters (floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc) in that they are (of course) "man-made."  In other words, these accidents generally result from human error.  As I have emphasized in previous posts ("Past is Prologue", "Study the Past", and "...all of this has happened before"), we can learn a lot by studying the experiences of how other leaders in the past have handled crises and how high reliability organizations (HROs) have prevented catastrophic accidents.  

With this in mind, our hospital's patient safety team and I have been holding a series of sessions in which we study famous catastrophes, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger accident or the BP Deepwater Horizon accident.  I am doing some background research to prepare for an upcoming case study on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.  There were two commercial mountaineering expeditions involved in this man-made disaster.  Basically, teams have to depart from the last outpost, Camp IV, at around midnight in order to make the summit of Mount Everest in time to turn around and return safely before nightfall.  One of the cardinal rules is that if climbers haven't reached the summit by 2 PM, they should turn around.  If they don't turn around, they run the risk of running into late afternoon storms and darkness.  They also run the risk of running short on their oxygen supply, a necessity at an altitude of just over 29,000 feet.  Unfortunately, on this particular expedition, a number of climbers (including the two expedition leaders) chose to ignore this cardinal rule and were caught in a blizzard on the top of the mountain.  Eight climbers died while trying to descend back to Camp IV.

There is a lot to unpack here.  Compare and contrast the experience in 1996 with the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition of 1907-1909.  The goal of this expedition (the first of Shackleton's three expeditions to Antarctica) was to be the first to reach the South Pole.  Of course, that objective was not met (the first expedition to reach the South Pole was an expedition led by the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen  on December 14, 1911).  Shackleton and his team came within approximately 100 miles of the South Pole before turning around to return safely home.  As Shackleton said, "We have shot our bolt."  

Rather than seeing the Nimrod expedition as a failure, Shackleton viewed the expedition as a success.  Only half of the expedition's goal was to reach the South Pole.  The other half of the goal was to actually make it back home alive.  And as a matter of fact, Shackleton and his team barely succeeded at the goal.  Shackleton returned to England a hero and was knighted shortly thereafter.  He would famously tell his wife, "Better a live donkey than a dead lion" (I actually think he said, "better a live ass" but who really knows).  

The other interesting point here is that the explorer Robert Falcon Scott led the Terra Nova Expedition at around the same time as Shackleton's Nimrod expedition.  Scott and four companions reached the South Pole 34 days after Amundsen and his team had achieved the feat.  However, whereas Amundsen and his team survived the journey back home, Scott and his four companions died of starvation and hypothermia before making it back to England.  In other words, Scott and his team suffered the same fate as the mountaineers of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.

I think that these four stories (the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Amundsen's South Pole expedition, Shackelton's Nimrod expedition, and Scott's Terra Nova expedition) make the point fairly clear.  The goal is to reach the mountaintop (or the Pole) AND to make it back alive.  Perhaps Scott and the mountaineers on Everest succumbed to hubris or they just plain old made a poor decision.  Unfortunately, they died as a result.  Setting your sights on a stretch goal is fine, but only if it doesn’t jeopardize the rest of the things that are important.  Sometimes, failing to achieve the goal is okay.  Sometimes, it's better to fail and live, than to succeed and die.  Sometimes, it's better to be a live donkey than a dead lion.