Big Wave Surfing (Jeff Clark, Laird Hamilton, Riding Giants 2010s)

As a little girl, Elizabeth learned to surf in Trebarwith Strand, a tiny tidal cove in Cornwall, UK.  This love of surfing has endured her whole life, and has become also part of the fabric of her inner and outer life.

The use of surfing as a means of opening up leadership patterns and possibilities derives from Elizabeth’s own use of surfing as a living metaphor for navigating places of chaos and complexity, and of the lessons drawn from surf culture about collaboration with wild forces beyond our control.

Global business is another place in which vast forces continually shape the lives of frail humans.  In the face of difficulty and uncontrollable forces, the normal human responses of fight or flight are highly inadequate.  In a fight the human will lose, dwarfed by scale.  In flight, the human can rarely outrun momentum.

What remains is the position, the board and the paddle.

Riding Giants exposes, on the grandest possible scale, the possibility of collaborating with forces beyond our control to make something of exquisite beauty.  The lessons of surfing for twenty-first century leaders are many:  To assess inner and outer conditions; to know when to dive deeper to elude the destructive potential of the breaking wave; to respect teachers and mentors; to persevere through the turbulence to get to the calm spot; to position oneself carefully to make catching the wave a possibility; to take time to stabilise before standing up; to make the most of the community ‘out the back’; when injured to take time to recover; to celebrate beauty.

And where possible, to get to the beach.