THE LAW OF NAVIGATION

“anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. Leaders who are good navigators are capable of taking their people just about anywhere.”

― John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: THE LAW OF NAVIGATION

In 1911, two groups of explorers set off on an incredible mission. Though they used different strategies and routes, the leaders of the teams had the same goal: to be the first in history to reach the South Pole. Their stories are life-and- death illustrations of the Law of Navigation.

One group was led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Ironically, Amundsen had not originally intended to go to Antarctica. His desire was to be the first man to reach the North Pole. But when he discovered that Robert Peary had beaten him there, Amundsen changed his goal and headed toward the other end of the earth. North or south—he knew his planning would pay off.

Before his team ever set off, Amundsen had painstakingly planned his trip. He studied the methods of the Eskimos and other experienced Arctic travelers and determined that their best course of action would be to transport all their equipment and supplies by dogsled. When he assembled his team, he chose expert skiers and dog handlers. His strategy was simple. The dogs would do most of the work as the group traveled fifteen to twenty miles in a six-hour period each day. That would afford both the dogs and the men plenty of time for daily rest prior to the following day’s travel.

Amundsen’s forethought and attention to detail were incredible. He located and stocked supply depots all along the intended route. That way they would not have to carry every bit of their supplies with them the whole trip. He also equipped his people with the best gear possible. Amundsen had carefully considered every possible aspect of the journey, thought it through, and planned accordingly. And it paid off. The worst problem they experienced on their trip was an infected tooth that one man had to have extracted.

The other team of people was led by Robert Falcon Scott, a British naval officer who had previously done some exploring in the Antarctic area. Scott’s expedition was the antithesis of Amundsen’s. Instead of using dogsleds, Scott decided to use motorized sledges and ponies. Their problems began when the motors on the sledges stopped working only five days into the trip. The ponies didn’t fare well either in those frigid temperatures. When they reached the foot of the Transantarctic Mountains, all of the poor animals had to be killed. As a result, the team members themselves ended up hauling the two-hundred-pound sledges. It was arduous work.

Scott hadn’t given enough attention to the team’s other equipment either. Their clothes were so poorly designed that all of the men developed frostbite. One team member required an hour every morning just to get his boots onto his swollen, gangrenous feet. Everyone became snowblind because of the inadequate goggles Scott had supplied. On top of everything else, the team was always low on food and water. That was also due to Scott’s poor planning. The depots of supplies Scott established were inadequately stocked, too far apart, and often poorly marked, which made them very difficult to find. Because they were continually low on fuel to melt snow, everyone became dehydrated. Making things even worse was Scott’s last-minute decision to take along a fifth man, even though they had prepared enough supplies for only four.

After covering a grueling eight hundred miles in ten weeks, Scott’s exhausted group finally arrived at the South Pole on January 17, 1912. There they found the Norwegian flag flapping in the wind and a letter from Amundsen. The other well-led team had beaten them to their goal by more than a month!

Scott’s expedition to the Pole is a classic example of a leader who could not navigate for his people. But the trek back was even worse. Scott and his men were starving and suffering from scurvy, yet Scott, unable to navigate to the very end, was oblivious to their plight. With time running out and the food supply desperately low, Scott insisted that they collect thirty pounds of geological specimens to take back—more weight to be carried by the worn-out men.

The group’s progress became slower and slower. One member of the party sank into a stupor and died. Another, Lawrence Oates, a former army officer who had originally been brought along to take care of the ponies, had frostbite so severe that he had trouble doing anything. Because he believed he was endangering the team’s survival, he purposely walked out into a blizzard to keep from hindering the group. Before he left the tent and headed into the storm, he said, “I am just going outside; I may be some time.”

Scott and his final two team members made it only a little farther north before giving up. The return trip had already taken two months, and still they were 150 miles from their base camp. There they died. We know their story only because they spent their last hours updating their diaries. Some of Scott’s last words were these: “We shall die like gentlemen. I think this will show that the Spirit of pluck and power to endure has not passed out of our race.”¹ Scott had courage but not leadership. Because he was unable to live by the Law of Navigation, he and his companions died by it.

Followers need leaders able to effectively navigate for them. When they’re facing life-and-death situations, the necessity is painfully obvious. But even when consequences aren’t as serious, the need is also great. The truth is that nearly anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. That is the Law of Navigation.

Former General Electric chairman Jack Welch asserts, “A good leader remains focused . . . Con- trolling your direction is better than being controlled by it.” Welch is right, but leaders who navigate do even more than control the direction in which they and their people travel. They see the whole trip in their minds before they leave the dock. They have vision for getting to their destination, they understand what it will take to get there, they know who they’ll need on the team to be successful, and they recognize the obstacles long before they appear on the horizon. Leroy Eims, author of Be the Leader You Were Meant to Be, writes, “A leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees farther than others see, and who sees before others do.”

The larger the organization, the more clearly the leader has to be able to see ahead. That’s true because sheer size makes midcourse corrections more difficult. And if there are errors in navigation, many more people are affected than when a leader is traveling alone or with only a few people. The disaster shown in James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic was a good example of that kind of problem. The crew could not see far enough ahead to avoid the iceberg altogether, and they could not maneuver enough to change course once the object was in view because of the size of the ship. The result was that more than one thousand people lost their lives.