Explorers are usually bearded dudes who head off into the jungle or polar ice to find a new place, climb a mountain or do some stupid feat of physical endurance. The truth is that most of the people that we really admire are explorers. This post is about why we need to explore and how you can become a business explorer
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes
Einstein’s mind explored the boundaries of physics and saw something entirely new. Jane Austen explored writing and came up with a way of exploring human emotions and empathy that no one had ever done before. Steve Jobs explored design and technology, Banksy explores street art and impact and I explore the jungle and what business models are.
Why do we need to explore?
A lot of people get bored. If stuff is the same the whole time they don’t like it. Some people explore clothes and fashion. Others explore books for new ideas. We as a species have a desire for novelty that seems to be insatiable.
Forget all the other stuff that people say about humans – big brain, opposable thumbs, playing with fire – the thing that defines us most is
What happens if….
closely followed by
Whoops
What’s the difference between physical and mental exploration
I spent a few years mapping several hundred square kilometres of the Malaysian jungle. I’d head off every afternoon after work and go down the first path that I came to that I hadn’t been down before.
To start with a lot of people had been down the paths. As I got deeper in the paths got smaller and smaller. Eventually, I often ended up wandering through the jungle following gaps between the trees, clearings and the occasional stream bed.
It was always hot. My legs were always covered with scratches and often running with blood from leech bites, swollen from ant bikes, shaking because a viper had dropped out of a tree on top of me. I chopped my fingers off once, stabbed myself with a bamboo spear, ran from a tiger that didn’t exist and ended up in hospital with heatstroke and dehydration.
Often I was off the edge of the map, with a phone that had no signal, a few ampules of morphine and a fear that I was only one small mistake away from dying, unfindable, in the wilderness.
The payback was amazing.
“I’ve seen things, you people wouldn’t believe, hmmm.
Bladerunner
… attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I’ve watched see Beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments, will be lost in time like tears in rain…”
Waterfalls deep in the jungle where you swam with shoals of huge fish, dawn rising over huge cliffs, columns of ants marching, deer caught for a moment in the evening sun
I’ve spent years now doing something similar with my passion for business model innovation. I’ve read what people have written, and take that as the starting point not the endpoint of my journey. I’ve looked out over great vistas of ideas that no one has touched, new thoughts at the end of a tenous path. Ideas that glimmer in the darkness that if brought out would change everything.
Because they are new, different, often unique it’s hard to convey what they are or their importance. I can see it, touch it, feel it, and others standing by see me with muddied hands and a ragged beard.
It is the same experience, going out and finding something precious and new that you can share. I think that we all like this in different ways
Why do we need to explore?
I don’t think that there is a certain personality type that is an explorer. We are all explorers. A friend of mine loves exploring other peoples bodies – most people would call him a serial cheater. Something drives him though. Another friend, who is creating an amazing clothes company is fascinated by the way that clothes, fashion and personality interact. She’s also an explorer.
It seems to be an innate drive in most of us. In some parts of our personality, it is large. In other’s not so large – I explore ideas and jungles but I am happy wearing the same style of clothes every day and eating the same food day after day.
There is that part in each of us that is driven
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Tennyson, Ulysses
Of all the western stars, until I die.
When we activate that part of us and follow our curiosity and desire to learn more, to make a change, to discover and to know, then we are often the happiest that we can be.
What does a business explorer do?
Business explorers are just the same as other explorers. They, We are always looking for the wonders of business. Because business likes its jargon – wonder is often hidden by ugly words like sales, profit, value proposition. What we are doing is just the same as when I went out into the jungle to find an amazing waterfall.
Business explorers are often entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are looking for a better way to change the world.
What if this technology changed our lives?
A lot of business explorers focus on the products and services that they create. This has been the focus of their exploration over the last century or so. Before that business explorers had different focuses. They were focused on finding new sources of products, or new markets. Think Christopher Colombus, Marco Polo, Vasco De Gama and more.
Increasingly though products and services aren’t distinct or novel. So much is new, that nothing seems to be new. Business exploration is starting to go in a new direction. Over the last few decades, we have seen business explorers start to create entirely different types of companies
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
ISaac Newton
As Isaac Newton said, it seems that we are on the verge of something incredibly exciting. A change in how we see the company and what it can be. That ocean of truth needs explorers to head out into it, to try and find what wonders it contains.
What are the benefits of exploration?
For most explorers, most of the time the benefits are that they have taken a path less trodden. They have followed their passion, desires, curiosity, to go where no one or few people have ever gone before.
I’m not going to dress this up. It’s a deeply personal experiential motivation. It’s not done for the hope of an explicit reward. The costs and risks when you face them are so much larger than any positive outcome that your internal daemon is the only thing that can push you into the storm.
The physical, material, reputational benefits are wonderful baubles that you collect as you return home.
These baubles are great. Let’s start with the psychological ones
Confidence and courage. When you leave civilisation behind you leave the cosy comfort that it gives you. You don’t have a safety net any longer. So as you head down the explorer’s path you have to make a choice. Do I go forward knowing I may die, or do I turn back,
Gandalf: I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.
Bilbo: I should think so—in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them …
Gandalf: You’ll have a tale or two to tell when you come back
Bilbo: You can promise that I’ll come back?”
Gandalf: No. And if you do, you will not be the same
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein
Bilbo came back with gold and some minor pieces of jewellery. Most of his companions died. His journey changed the world.
Focus on the Change not the Baubles
When we look at business explorers we don’t admire the ones who became rich and came back with lots of baubles. We admire the ones that changed the world – Steve Jobs, Andrew Carnegie, Jakob Fugger. And if you can find the right business model then pretty much everything material in the world that can be bought can be yours.
That’s the promise of being a business explorer. Find a new business model that creates more sales or profits than any other business model and much of the world’s wealth can become yours.
The other benefit is that your name will be recorded for generations – history book stuff.
Look at it this way. If you decided not to be a business explorer and spent your life climbing to the top of a Fortune 100 or FTSE 100 company then you will make some money. More than most people can imagine. In the greater scheme of things, you will be quickly insignificant and soon forgotten.
How many CEO’s of the 10 largest companies in your country do you know? What about their predecessors? The ones that you care about and want to emulate are the explorers, not the ones who managed the supply base that you set out from.
What are the costs of being an explorer?
Most paths go nowhere. In earlier times most explorers died early, riddled with disease and crippled by injury. They died in the desert-like Burke and Wills, frozen in Alpine passes like Otzi the iceman, or lost in the jungle like Jim Thompson.
Business explorers can fail spectacularly – losing reputation, money and freedom even if they aren’t total fraudsters.
Most explorers when they find a path or trail that is worth following take 10-12 years to find something valuable and bring it back safely. It is a work of a decade or more. Partly because so much time is taken up by discovering what it is that you don’t know that you don’t know.
Most entrepreneurs fail. That’s ok. The toughest lesson is to learn how to get going again when you have fallen once again. The best thing is that it starts off easy and so you normally have time to learn – and if you fail and move on then you can recover your life and live with more confidence and poise than you did before.
How do you start exploring?
Many years ago I walked out of Bristol to the start of the motorway. I had a small sign that said Jerusalem.
I didn’t get there that trip, I accidentally ended up in a war zone and almost froze to death in the German winter. One of my mistakes was that I used the motorways to hitchhike. Each time I was picked up I travelled hundreds of kilometres. It was easy but I didn’t learn much.
The smaller the road, the more interesting the journey and the more I learned, when people picked me up.
This is definitely true when you want to start exploring. If there are lots of people on that path don’t use it. You can assume that if there was anything valuable to find it will have already been picked up. Anything left over is probably an illusion.
Take Different Routes
Start simply. Take a different route to work every single day. When I have done this it is an exceptionally uncomfortable feeling.
There are lots of routes to work (actually taking my kids to school) that I don’t want to take because they aren’t efficient. they are going to take longer. Because I have a map in my head of Loughborough I KNOW this. So I stick to the safe roads that deliver good results.
This is what a business manager does. The goal is to get from A to B in the shortest possible time. Always. That’s good for normal business. But when you want to change, when you can’t actually drive from a to B any faster because of the traffic and roadworks, then you need to play a different game.
When you explore you aren’t trying to get from A to B. To are trying to see what happens after you leave A. the more different paths you take the more diversity of experience you have. The more diversity you have the more chance you have of discovering something new.
So the practical test of trying to drive to work a different way each day forces you to embrace that tension between efficiency and exploration. Don’t try and be efficient. Live with that discomfort and let it go. Efficiency is a habit (often a useful one) but it’s not a hammer that you can use everywhere.
Once you have the different routes to work method nailed – list out all the good things that you discovered doing it. If you want, list out all the times that you were late, took wrong turns, got stuck in traffic etc. But focus on the surprising discoveries. Then start applying the same technique to other areas in your life.
How can I take a different path?
What different paths exist?
What will happen if I go down them?
What are the best tools for explorers?
As I was typing this I looked out at what my son was doing on his iPad he’d been drawing a map of Europe by hand so that he could play an imaginary war across it.
I started this post by talking about how I had mapped 500km2 of the jungle in Malaysia. I’d made a map and discovered the territory.
When you are exploring there is so much sensory information coming at you. Even years on I still have a sense of how paths turned, where the trees were, how steep and rutted a hill was. These though, are mental impressions. Fragmented, useless for any practical purpose. We need to find ways of bringing them into a coherent image that lets us show others what we have explored.
Physical explorers use maps. Business explorers use a whole variety of management tools. The best, so far, seems to be the business model canvas. This allows you to map out new types of business quickly, and then to explorer the ideas that your map has captured ever more deeply.
Crystallise and condense your insights into a map. How you do it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you extract the essence of your exploration and are able to explain it to others.
The other key tool is putting a question mark as often as can into almost everything that you do.
Curiosity.
- Why is this like this?
- What can be different?
- How does this work?
And always the stupid question that moves the rock of dogma and unearths the diamond of insight.
What does it mean to be an explorer?
To be an explorer is in larger part to choose your own path and leave the crowd behind. It is to be comfortable being different. It is being confident that even if this trail doesn’t give an answer, one that you soon take will give you AN answer, if not the answer.
It’s knowing that there are more answers out there than you imagine, possibly even more answers than you can imagine. It’s having the courage to walk off the edge of the map, to stand at the edge of the universe and put your arm out – and make it bigger, that makes you an explorer.
And above all, it’s the desire to come back and tell others what you have found.
I work with explorers who are pushing the limits of business knowledge. They are seeking to change the world by going out into the far edges of technology, culture and environment to find new business models that, when all is said and done, change everything.
And the final world from George Bernard Shaw
You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
George Bernard Shaw – Back to Methuselah
Say why not, and start exploring
We need to explore because novelty is important to almost everyone, and you don’t find novelty where there are lots of people
A physical explorer heads out into the wilderness or the unknown – braving physical and mental discomfort. A mental explorer heads out into the world of ideas looking for new ones or challenging old truths to find new possibilities
A business explorer is looking for new ways of creating customer value, that is better than existing approaches. Sie is not concerned about what has gone before, about business dogma or established truth. Sie wants to find a better type of business that disrupts the competition
The benefits of exploration are often serendipitous. You rarely find out what you intend to discover, but the stuff you discover along the way is often more valuable. Think about Christopher Colombus
Exploring is uncomfortable. You are the first, so you are often having to make decisions on no or inadequate information. A lot of them are going to be wrong. That hurts – mentally and physically.
The easiest way – take a different route to work every single day. Even if it is less efficient. Try all the different paths you can take and see what you discover
Curiosity. Ask why. Always ‘Why is it like this? “, “What happens if I change this?” “What happens if I do that?”
Explorers live on the edge of the known world. They are always going out to map the unknown and to discover new wonders. They have an amazing sense of awe and wonder.
