It started for the 14 of us as an interesting, challenging kayak tour. The narrow river was a bit on high-tide with fallen trees inside, but not extremely difficult. The first day was planned as around 40 kms (25 miles), planned by our two athletic team leaders. Nothing impossible. Even though our maps indicated us 5 times portaging. 5 times? We are young and strong …
In real life on the river, it turned out to be a bit different though: On the physical and maybe mental limit for some of us who did not have a lot of experience in kayaking. Exhausted, we arrived at the night destination, mounted the tents, did some cooking … and fell asleep.
Next morning there seemed to be some tension in the air that maybe had been overridden by fatigue the night before. When we did the first stop near a lovely little town, part of the group did not come back from the break. What had happened? As they answered by cellphone, there had formed a fraction that had enough of it.
“This is better than paddling”
- “We’ll stay here and drink a beer. This is not a race, but our holiday.”
Understandable to some extent, but …
From now on and for the rest of the trip, we had two fractions: The sports-maniacs and the beer-drinkers.
Camping at different sites, we did not see each other again for the rest of the tour – which per se is no big problem.
But the crowd began to gossip, saying nasty things about the respective other party.
- “They did never ask us about the tour.”
- “These sports lunatics always decide on base of their egoistic needs.”
on one side.
- “If these lazy folks want to rest every 30 minutes, they should better stay home.”
- “If they prefer their beer to the team spirit, we don’t need them anyway”.
from the other side.
And worse things. Even a year later, some hostility persisted. I learned a very important lesson out of it:
A lesson in Group Dynamics.
- Groups bigger than 8 people are not likely to be stable. This seems like a natural law we experienced also during other activities like hiking and skiing.
- Be sure before you start a trip that everybody actively agrees. Best is to make a meeting with everybody – no excuse allowed. Although we usually distributed the tour per e-mail, some people did simply not read it in detail.
- Take care about soft skills as well as hard skills when you form a group. A positive mental attitude and team spirit is at least as important as paddling skills.
- Adapt the length and difficulty of the tour to the “less advanced” member of the group. Mix tandem kayaks or canoes between an advanced and a less advanced paddler.
- Be flexible during a trip, able to change the length of a daytrip in favorite of the next, to include a break if necessary …
- Be a positive example for team spirit. You are with a group and that it is – later at home you will be able to live your unlimited personal individualism.
Have a harmonic trip!