Truth 12. Leave yourself room to get back from the pole
Do you have a margin for error? Mountain climbers know that the real trick is not getting to the summit but getting back down safely. When making a major decision, particularly a risky one, you need to have a plan to make your way back if it doesn't work out.
This was the difference between Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott in their journeys to the South Pole. In 1909, Shackleton had crossed the Antarctic to within 97 miles of the pole. He had made it farthest south and would have been the first person to reach the pole if he had continued. He might have reached the pole, but he knew he couldn't bring his crew safely back. As he looked at his men, many suffering already from the ravages of cold and insufficient diet, he made the heartbreaking decision to turn around. He and all his men made it back safely.
Scott stood at the same point on January 9, 1912, three years to the day after Shackleton, but Scott decided to head on to the pole. With the failure of his horses and motorized tractors earlier in his trip, he and his men were forced to man-haul their sleds. They made it to the pole, but the entire party was lost on the way back.
This was also the mistake that Napoleon made in attacking Russia, stretching his troops and supply lines too thin against a fierce, entrenched enemy and brutal winter environment. Hitler didn't learn from this lesson and proceeded to repeat the mistake. Did they think carefully enough about what could have gone wrong and how they might recover?
How do you keep open a path of retreat? First, pay attention so that you can recognize when the decision you have made is not working out. What were the assumptions behind the decision? Have they been proven false by subsequent feedback? If you can identify the assumptions behind your decisions, you can recognize when those assumptions no longer hold.
One way to keep open a path of retreat is to build a margin for error into your decision making. Roland Huntford, in his book The Last Place on Earth, detailing the race to the South Pole, notes the difference in margin for error of Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. Amundsen prepared for the worst, carrying more than ten times more food and fuel per person than Scott and placing supplies far closer to the pole for his return. Scott expected the best and was disappointed when the unpredictable polar regions didn't cooperate. "In a journey of four months, Scott had not allowed for four days' bad weather," Huntford notes. Amundsen made it back safely with food to spare. Scott and his men perished from starvation when they were pinned down by an extended storm.
Amundsen left a generous margin for error in other areas as well. As another example, consider how he marked his caches of food. Like other explorers, he ran supply missions out to bury food and other supplies in the snow and ice before making his primary push to the pole. Many explorers would mark these caches with a few flags in a sea of ice and snow. After reading about how others had missed or nearly missed these needles in haystacks, Amundsen came up with a system that gave his men more margin for error. He put flags on each cache and then ran a horizontal series of flags five miles on either side at half-mile intervals. This gave his men a 10-mile target. Each flag was numbered so a traveler coming across a single flag would know exactly where to go to find the cache.
A margin of error allows you to recover more quickly or to survive if the decision does not work out as planned. In considering any decision, ask yourself what could go wrong. What would be your response? Do you have a plan B? A plan C? Have you thought through the various possible scenarios? How can you build a margin for error into your decision? Do you have a way back from the pole?