Destructive goal pursuit: The mount everest disaster

Imagine training your sights on a distant goal, an ideal dream. You devote resources, make sacrifices, and direct unwavering attention to achieving the goal. The goal may have begun as a dream, like climbing a mountain. The lure of mountaineering is magical. After a few successful climbs on short, easy routes, you seek greater challenges. Dreaming of the summit becomes electric, the experience of climbing a craving. After a time your dreams become bigger. Each mountain peak you climb and each successful summit make you crave more. You begin to catch what climbers call “summit fever.”

You think about achieving the goal almost constantly. Your training, diet, and waking hours are devoted to it. Some say you are obsessed, but you know now what it means to have a sense of purpose. You continue to direct more attention and resources to attaining the goal. Your family and friends, once excited about the idea of summiting Everest, have heard about its dangers. They have heard that about 1 in 6 do not make it back alive. You quickly remind them that reliable statistics are hard to come by in a country that does not keep formal records on the mountain.

Pursuing the summit of Everest becomes part of who you are. Your selfimage becomes inseparable from the summit. Contingencies, unintended consequences, and other obstacles attempt to get in your way but ultimately fail to distract you. And distractions they are, since such obstacles only remind you to focus on what is important—achieving your goal. You focus on the summit. You become determined to meet your goal. The goal itself is straightforward: summit the mountain. You know, at least in theory, how this can be done. You put trust in the expedition leaders, and they reassure you that they have it all figured out. Stay the course, don’t get distracted, and listen to their guidance. Don’t worry about the inevitable setbacks, such as the lack of sleep, the uncomfortable cough, the egos of your climbing partners. Focus on attaining your goal. You don’t need to worry about finding excuses because you will have success. Your sense of self and the goal have become inseparable.

You arrive at Katmandu in the Kingdom of Nepal—one of the most bizarre and underdeveloped cities in the world. The kingdom has only been open to westerners since the 1950s. You discover that modernity has only begun to trickle in. As your plane lands at the airport, you are shocked to see abandoned fuselages and old airplane engine parts littered just off the runway. You quickly become aware that you are in a place that has a different set of beliefs and habits.

In the midst of pursuing your goal, it becomes difficult to think about why you are pursuing the goal—your initial motivation and why achieving the goal has become so important. You don’t have time to think about the past; you can only focus your attention on what it will take to reach the goal. The goal you have set, summiting Everest, is simple and clear. No one will doubt that you have reached the summit. In fact, at home and now here on the isolated mountain, there is little doubt; everyone seems to think that you will achieve the goal. Indeed, you have had to counsel those who fail to see your progress to this point as anything less than spectacular. You counsel them that they fail to see your strength and they fail to recognize your progress up the mountain so far. In fact, their negativity only makes the goal more clear. Any obstacles that may rest between you and reaching the summit seem small in comparison to the ecstasy you will experience once the summit is achieved.

Today you set out to achieve your goal, the summit of Everest. You have now spent weeks climbing up and down the side of the world’s highest mountain, setting up ropes, establishing continually higher camps, and working through the treacherous pillars of ice in the Khumbu ice fall. At base camp you are now taking about 20 breaths a minute, and your body can barely stay hydrated. You need to eat over 6,000 calories a day just to maintain your weight.

The usual inhospitable weather patterns on Everest become unusually hospitable between May and June. This brief bit of relatively mild weather, sandwiched between the harsh winter and the summer monsoon, provides the window to the summit of Everest. The late morning this time of year can be particularly clear, almost pleasant. Since you are breathing the pure supplemental bottled oxygen, you feel a sense of euphoria and forget about the actual inhospitability of the environment. The afternoon sunshine lures you into complacency. The turnaround time that you planned on becomes easy to ignore. You forget that your visit to this inhospitable environment must be brief. It becomes hard to imagine an impending storm. You continue to pursue your goal of reaching the summit without abandon.

You are trapped. You made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain, but now you struggle with your teammates to get down. You are caught in a blinding storm and your body is about to give out. Even though you are only a few hundred yards from a safe camp, with tents and oxygen, you cannot navigate through the blinding storm that engulfs you. You begin to rely heavily on your teammates—members of other teams, who were once your competition, may be your only chance to survive. You try to talk to team members but soon realize the difficulties of communicating in a blinding storm. The wind, snow, and craziness of the situation make verbal communication almost impossible. You try hand signals but those too are difficult to see in the blinding snow. Normal modes of communication have broken down.

Once you have obtained your goal, you reflect back on what occurred and realized that you overlooked important, life-threatening details. You reached the summit and achieved your goal, but you did so at a cost. The cost included the lives of other team members, the time you committed to reaching the summit that you could have spent on other productive pursuits, and the suffering of those who love you as they waited to hear about your fate.

This chapter argues that scholars and practitioners alike spend too much time thinking about goals and not enough time thinking about learning. This emphasis on goals at the expense of learning is particularly troublesome in the area of leadership. Conventional wisdom on leadership suggests that leaders should set ambitious and challenging goals and then get out of the way (e.g., Hackman, 2002). This chapter suggests that this kind of thinking can lead to disastrous consequences because it assumes too much from both teams and leaders.

Goals shape the future by creating a vision of what can be achieved. But when goals become the sole driver for action, destructive goal pursuit begins to take shape. The 1996 Mt Everest climbing disaster, in particular the teams led by Scott Fischer and Rob Hall, provides a compelling illustration of the process of destructive goal pursuit. As the climbers continued to put more and more effort into reaching the summit and continued to ignore pre-established turnaround times, the team of climbers pursued the summit at the cost of their own lives.