Welcome back to Sunday Story, and it’s a bit late today as we are on holiday enjoying the best of what our home has to offer. This week, I’ll be writing about a topic I know well - Indiana Jones - and what our leadership can learn from him.
Indiana Jones - the fictitious archeologist made famous by Steven Spielberg’s 5-film series starring Harrison Ford - has always been one of my favourite fictional characters. From a young age, I fell in love with the adventures of this character, and I have always been a huge fan. In many ways, my own spirit of adventure was inspired by Indy, and over the course of my life I’ve gone from looking up to a worldly adventurer to becoming one myself.
This character is on my mind because just a few days ago, I introduced by son to him - melting faces and hearts getting ripped out is probably a bit much for a kid his age, but he’s pretty solid on what is real and what is pretend, and I knew from the moment Indy escaped the boulder that my little guy was just as hooked as I was. As soon as Raiders ended, he wanted to start Temple of Doom; we whipped through that and then started The Last Crusade and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in short order. The most recent film came out last year - I had actually not seen it yet. I was saving Dial of Destiny to watch it for the first time with him, together, and we finished up our Indy-athon by sharing our first viewing of that film.
So, what lessons can Indy teach us about Leadership and Disruption? Well, if our UFO piece in the Disruption series is correct, maybe the 4th movie can teach us a lot - but jokes aside, Indy can cast the torchlight on a lot of leadership practices that can help us as everyday leaders get our people through disruptive times. I’ve picked the top 3 for this article to share with you.
1) In a dynamic situation, goals matter more than plans. This shows up in Indy’s life basically on every adventure - they say, after all, adventure is what happens when things go wrong and inevitably that’s Indiana Jones’ story. He doesn’t plan to tangle with the Nazis or the Cultists or the Soviets - he’s usually involved in something else, and it just so happens one of these big bad evil groups also want that same something else, and conflict ensues. On several occasions, Indy is the first to admit to Sallah or Marion the limits of his plans — “I don’t know I’m figuring this out as I go”.
For some people, tackling a challenge without a plan is simply planning to fail at the challenge, and they are right - most of the time. When a person is faced with a major obstacle, having a good plan to overcome it simply makes sense - everyone knows their place and their role in a good plan, and so long as you’ve got good people, it can be executed reasonably well. But in a disruptive situation, you may not have the contextual stability necessary to have a good plan. When a big disruption is happening, you’ll have to be used to the idea of not having all of the information before making decisions, and you’ll have to be ready for when the decisions you took under yesterday’s conditions are different from today. That’s the nature of disruption - it’s an unpredictable context that makes true planning really difficult. Instead, the disruptive leaders should focus on the goal - secure the Ark or the Grail from the bad guys for example - while allowing the “how” to be a bit dynamic and responsive to the fortunes of the situation. By embracing a bit of “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go along” like Indy, it will help you be a lot more resilient in the face of major disruptions.
2) The thing you get isn’t always the thing you were going for. Think back on Indiana Jones’s films: In Raiders he got the Ark of the Covenant, and it was promptly locked down in a warehouse by the US Government. In Temple, he saved the Shankara Stones from Pankot Palace, but rather than bring the relics to museums in exchange for fortune and glory, he returned the sacred stone to the village. In Crusade, he went after the Holy Grail, and lost it in a pit. In Crystal Skull, the titular object was returned to the alien spaceship, and in Dial of Destiny - well, that ones still a bit new so I want to avoid spoilers, but he didn’t get the artefact at the end of that one either. He’s always losing and, you could argue, Indy never wins. But that’s not quite true, is it?
In Raiders, he stopped the bad guys from having access to the most powerful weapon in history and rekindled his relationship with his main squeeze. In Temple, he returned life and vitality to a village via the magic stone, but more importantly, freed the village’s children and returned them to their family. In Last Crusade, he saved his father’s life; and in both Kingdom and Dial of Destiny, he reconnected with the things that matter most: His family.
Leadership in Disruption is often like this, and we’ve said this a few times. Disruption and Transformation are the same - the main difference is your leadership. If you sit back and allow a thing to happen to you, it’s going to be disruptive. But if you lean into that discomfort and instead try to engage in the disruptive force on purpose, it can be a source of great transformation. The trouble with transformation (or disruption) is you don’t necessarily know what things are going to look like on the other side. You may embark on your transformation leadership challenge with a clear idea on what comes after, but odds are good you’ll be wrong - something will be different. The composition of the team may have changed, the context you are in or the main driver of the work - something will have changed. But transformation is really more like a metamorphosis than a stepwise change; it’s a process of becoming something else that is totally different from what you, your team, and your organization used to be. Indy’s adventures teach us that this is a normal part of growth and change, and it’s one to be embraced - Indy never “won” per se, but he certainly never lost, and while the actual treasures he pursued were often out of reach, the treasures he received instead were of far greater value.
3) Leadership, like Life, has seasons. Watching the Indy movies so close together - seeing the first being made when he was in his 30s, the last when he’s over 80 years old - was an eye-opening experience. It’s hard to watch your heroes get older, but full credit to Harrison and the filmmaking team, they did a good job of allowing him to age gracefully. In the most recent film, the haymaker punches were easier for the bad guys to dodge and shrug off, and he wasn’t as spry as he used to be, but he still got the job done leaning more into his wits and experience than in his brute force and grit. In one film, he laments the passing of both his father and Marcus Brody - two fixtures from the original trilogy - and his friend and confidant says to him “We seem to have reached the age when life stops giving us things and starts taking them away”.
This quote is powerful, because our leadership is a bit like this too. In our early careers as leaders, there were conferences, new friendships, and a whole lot of firsts. If your path was anything like mine, that meant a lot of weddings, celebrations of births of babies, and big parties celebrating the completion of degrees or big parties. The dopamine of “new” is addictive. But over time, it changes. Teryn and I have noticed that we’ve not been to a wedding of any peers in a while - not because we’re bad guests, but because of our social network, many people have taken that step already. Most people who are having kids have had them. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a conference where I didn’t know anybody, and it’s been a minute since I was in a leadership situation that wasn’t at least similar to a situation I’d encountered before. We’ve reached a more mature part of our lives.
As has everyone; we are all getting older - I now have to use sunscreen on the top of my head due to a bit of thinning hair. And as we get older, wisdom and experience come with our bald spots and shapes our leadership practice. But that comes with risk to you living your best life.
Imagine if when Adventure knocked, Indy in his elder years said “Nah, I don’t do fieldwork anymore - that’s something I used to do”? Not only would we be devoid of two great films, but it would feel fundamentally “not Indy”; this would be a compromise to his character and it wouldn’t feel right. There’s risk there with our own leadership too - as you go from season to season of your life and your leadership, it’s easy to allow those years and experience to change you. And it should change you - it always does - but that too is a form of transformation or disruption that you have some agency in; if you allow it to change you in a way that compromises the person you choose to be, you’ll have made a mistake. However if instead, you use those changes to inform your next adventure - the way Indy does - you’ll be living life authentically, leading with purpose and values, and be far more satisfied in a life well lived.
Everyone’s got a version of “snugging the hat on your brim and getting to it” - it doesn’t have to be grandiose adventures where this grit shows up for you. But whatever and however that grit shows up, it’s important that you allow it to show up no matter how old you are or what season your life is in. Life is short, after all - we gotta make the most of it. By embracing our seasons of our life, getting the things we didn’t know we’re looking for, and remembering to embrace the dynamic situations we find ourselves in, we can all benefit from bringing a little Indiana Jones to our Leadership.
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