Teaching Leadership in and out of the wilderness

We love all of you who have been praying and supporting us over these last 14 years of ministry with the CCO. We love you all the more because sometimes I know it's not all too clear what it is that we do and yet you have remained faithful. Thank you! 

So imagine how excited I was when I came across an article in last month's Harvard Business Review that may be helpful in articulating one of the many services our department of the CCO offers to our students, staff and partners. 

The CCO's core purpose is Transforming College Students To Transform The World. Joy and I and the folks in our department which is called CCO Experiential Designs (or XD for short) use adventure, service and travel to design and facilitate moments of transformation: moments when students or CCO staff come to know Jesus and as a consequence, themselves and how they lead and love, little more deeply. 

The HBR article describes the kind of leadership that can be learned on wilderness expeditions and its direct application in the work world. The article is about the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) which was founded by the grandfather of American mountaineering, Paul Petzold, who also founded the Wilderness Education Association (WEA). The WEA has just accredited the CCO as an Outdoor Educator Certification program (Remember all that work we did a year ago to complete the organizational self-study for accreditation?). The curriculum used in NOLS and WEA are very similar since both organizations trace their roots to the same man. CCO students who go on XD summer transformative opportunities are receiving the same teaching, character development and preparation to go and lead wherever God calls them as described by the authors.

The brief summary is that on wilderness expeditions participants learn to: practice leadership, lead from everywhere, behave well, keep calm, and disconnect to connect and these are skills and dispositions that are incredibly valuable in today's work world.

If you want to read the whole article with the work world application examples, here's a link to "HBR Wilderness Leadership.pdf" in my Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/umco0swm14kmvom/HBR%20Wilderness%20Leadership.pdf

These principles of leadership are also at the heart of a lot of the professional development work we have been offering in the offices of CCO partners and other organizations. If you have any questions about the leadership development programs and consultation XD has been doing or if you are looking for help with your company's leadership training, feel free to contact Joy or I. We'd love to dream about ways we can help you.

Francois