by Will Dean
So we constructed the first Electroshock Therapy in the office out of modified cattle fence wires and took turns at running through the hanging wires wet through, some live with ten thousand volts—about half a Taser’s worth. We experimented with different densities of wires and length of run—in the end we figured it should be about a fifty-foot run over mud and hay bales, with about a thousand hanging wires to get through. The experience was unnerving, sometimes very unpleasant, but certainly survivable. It also led to another innovation for us: we decided it would be a one-time only experience. Our returning legionnaires would be spared from doing it again if they chose to. Another good reason to come back.
One of the useful things about launching such an obstacle in the United States is that health and safety regulations are comparatively light. (By the time we came to launch in Australia and the United Kingdom, where the opposite is the case, we had a year’s worth of safety data, but even so we needed to provide a full medical analysis, signed by a doctor who asserted that the obstacle “was no more dangerous than a cow fence,” which was either reassuring or not, depending on your feelings about cow fences.)
Despite this, it was with more than usual paternal concern that I watched the first Mudders negotiate Electroshock Therapy at our opening event of 2010 at Tri-State, in Arizona. I have a pragmatic frame of mind. I believe in trusting the data. Everyone had assured me that Electroshock Therapy would work. We had reviewed what science we could a thousand times and tested the technology over and over on ourselves. Even so, you would have to be extremely cool, or worse, not to have a certain amount of anxiety the night before you electrified five thousand strangers in a muddy ditch. I had long learned that the comforting cliché “what’s the worst that can happen?” was not much use when it came to thinking about Tough Mudder at three a.m. There was, after all, quite a lot of downside to our being wrong.
Now, 2.5 million people have run through those wires—a cumulative 250 billion volts delivered. It feels a little strange. Some people may imagine I take a sick pride in knowing so many people have paid us to suffer, but I mostly think about the connections and the communality of the experience that EST created.
Electroshock Therapy quickly became our most angsty obstacle because it was the hardest to imagine. We sit in focus group sessions where individual Tough Mudders say both, “I hate it” and “You can’t change it.” Skill, strength, and dexterity don’t help you much because the wires are too closely arranged, so it’s the obstacle that is most likely to reduce alpha men and women, those whose bodies are sculpted temples, to knock-kneed kids. There is an element of randomness to it that adds to the anxiety—it zaps a few people off their feet, others pass through unscathed. I honestly don’t know how much of that is physiological or psychological, dumb luck or bravado. What I do know is that the sheer number of finish-line conversations that begin with how much Electroshock Therapy sucked—and the shared moment that creates—must now be in the millions, if not tens of millions. That fact genuinely makes me smile, just like I did to Katie that Sunday morning when I first decided we had to include it.
Each of the obstacles we have created has something of the same emotional attachment. They are all the result of a greater or lesser amount of blood, sweat, and tears, and each one has taken on a vivid personality for us. We have grown up with them, but we’ve also never been afraid to try to improve them. Often small modifications make all the difference. At one point we gave Everest—the signature half-pipe Mudders attempt to scale—a rounded top rather than a sharp lip, a small change that significantly increases the teamwork element because there is nothing to grab onto except other people’s hands. Likewise, by listening to participants and watching dozens of events, we added a slide to Arctic Enema, which deposits you into the Dumpster of seventy-five thousand pounds of ice. Nolan described the change as a way of “extending a Holy shit! moment as long as possible,” which pretty well describes a lot of what we try to do.
By necessity to begin with, we did most of our innovating on-site at events. The challenge then, and the challenge now, is to keep that sense of playful possibility in how we approach things. Much has been written about the value of quick improvisation and testing in product design. Eric Ries made the “build-measure-learn feedback loop” of “continuous innovation” the core of his powerful Lean Startup model. The idea was to spend less time and money planning and learn by doing and quickly evaluating. We were, like any start-up, testing and learning all sorts of things all the time—systems, logistics, revenue streams, and concepts. One of the great advantages we had in creating those habits was that build-measure-learn was in our DNA from creating obstacles.
For example, in the process of creating and evolving King of the Swingers, in which Mudders jump for a trapeze bar and swing out to ring a bell before plunging from a height of sixty-five feet into water, we experimented with at least a dozen versions—higher and lower platforms, bigger and smaller jumps, different kinds of trapezes—before we got the spectacular drama and Mudder experience we wanted. The sense that improvement is possible and welcome at any time tends to get squeezed out of companies or strangled by rules that remove the element of chance or last-minute spontaneity. I was determined as we grew that those habits would never form at Tough Mudder.
This was an attitude of mind. I knew from the beginning that while we had to be as efficient and have as much attention to detail as we possibly could, we also had to remind ourselves in everything we did of the experience we were delivering to people. A good part of that experience was childlike freedom in the feeling of slithering around in mud for the hell of it. Even today there can’t be many children who have not on one Saturday or another set up an obstacle course and realized that the building of it was as much fun as the clambering round it. The entire goal of Tough Mudder is to revive that feeling in adults who spend half their lives sitting in a gray carpeted cubicle staring at a screen, or stuck in traffic, or who measure their weekdays in back-to-back meetings and PowerPoint presentations. It was imperative that every time they came to a Tough Mudder—and we want the tribe to return over and over—they would be excited by a new dramatic test of character or determination or teamwork. Standing still was not an option for them and it was not an option for us.
There is a good deal of recent research to suggest that human beings are at their most creative and ingenious at about the age of eight. After that, after they get educated and told not to make mistakes and that there is only one right answer, it is often all downhill as far as creative thinking is concerned.
I can vouch for this research myself. At eight, I went on a school geography trip to a farm. Afterward the teacher asked, “Who is good at writing stories?” And all my friends chirped, “William Dean! He’s the best at writing stories!” So this teacher said to me: “OK, William, you are going to write up the geography field trip for the school newspaper.” So I wrote what seemed to me like the best story I—or perhaps anyone else—had ever written: full of drama and adventure and monsters and near-death experiences and dream sequences and possibly alien abduction. When I handed it proudly to my teacher he scanned through it and said: “What’s this? William, you were just supposed to write about what happened at the farm!” I looked at him like he was crazy. “But what happened at the farm wasn’t a very good story, sir.”
Peter Skillman’s Marshmallow Challenge is a good demonstration of that childlike capacity for creativity. Skillman was head of design for Palm—a company that itself benefited from the original try-and-fail prototypes of others, including Apple, and created the first handheld smartphone in 1996. Skillman’s challenge was a seemingly simple one. Teams of four or five people are given twenty strands of dry spaghetti, a roll of tape, a ball of string, and a marshmallow. The idea is to construct the tallest possible structure using only these items to support the marshmallow. Each team has 19 minutes to complete the task. Skillman has run the challenge with groups of all kinds
. What he consistently found was this: those who generally performed best, who created the tallest towers, were recent graduates of kindergarten. And those who performed worst, whose towers collapsed or failed or didn’t get off the ground? Recent MBA graduates.
There is, as Skillman argued, a good reason for this. There are two fundamental approaches to building the tower. The schoolkids tend to adopt the first one—they dive straight into construction and get the marshmallow on top of their makeshift towers right away to see what will work. Once they are involved in the building they tend to collaborate easily, focused on modifying and testing and changing, pooling ideas until they find solutions.
The MBAs tended to approach the task from the other end of the telescope. They generally had trouble to begin with deciding who in the group has the most expertise in tower construction, dredging up evidence of successful construction projects from their résumés. They then tended to spend too long deciding whose prototype tower would work and sketching blueprints. Some did calculations. By the seventeenth minute they had typically constructed a tower to their guidelines, but so far they had not put a marshmallow on top of it. Invariably, when they did, the tower collapsed and there was no time to start again.
We stuck to the eight-year-olds’ way of doing things as long as we could, partly out of necessity at Tough Mudder events, working on the basis that creativity is always a dream with a deadline. Mostly the deadlines were a few days or a few hours when we were constructing and revising the first Mudder obstacles. After about event three, we knew that if we were to achieve any consistency and embed the innovation process in the team we had to bring construction in house. We hired a no-nonsense small-scale builder based in Pennsylvania. Typically, the builder and Nolan and I would stand in a field looking at an obstacle once it was in place, making changes. I would say that it needed to have two feet added here or to cut that bit off. Nolan would translate my British English into Pennsylvania builders’ language. Nothing at all was ever drawn up or written down. There were some frustrations with that. But there was also a kind of built-in creative confidence.
When we started running multiple events, that trial-and-error process was too haphazard and exhausting. Nolan and I couldn’t look at every obstacle we built, so we tried to formalize it a bit, without losing the make-it-up spirit. I think innovation invariably begins with design rather than abstract thinking. With this in mind we worked with a company called IDEO—slogan: “fail often to succeed sooner”—led by the professional innovator and Haas School of Business professor Tom Kelley.
Kelley, who had grown IDEO quickly from twenty employees to five hundred, had done a lot of research into the ways that teams become creative. He argued among other things that “great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before.”
That idea is at the heart of what Tough Mudder is about, both as a company and as a challenge. We’ve all seen the effects of pessimism in groups we’ve worked with, the people who think they are being most helpful by saying what is not possible, by pointing out the downsides before you have begun. I’m all for healthy skepticism, but when that frame of mind dominates any balancing sense of madcap hope, not much new gets achieved. A diehard realist could never start a business or navigate a Tough Mudder course.
Kelley also argued that the single inspired idea, the magic bullet that would solve everything, was not only never going to happen, it was not desirable. The journey to solutions creates solutions. You can’t force creative answers. So many of the things that defined Tough Mudder, the pledge, the headband, several of the obstacles, were envisaged when we weren’t consciously solving a problem. Sometimes the strain to “be creative” gets in the way; allow yourself some space to kick back and often you find the answer arrives. There has to be a balance between structured problem solving and space for improvisation and we worked hard to incorporate that principle in the way we designed obstacles.
Ingrained knowledge of structure leads intuitively to creativity. Everyone loves the idea of the one-off genius who comes up with the killer formula out of thin air. Paul McCartney may have woken up with the melody for “Yesterday” in his head—and spent several days obsessively searching and asking where he might have heard it before—but he did so only because he had spent the previous ten years always trying and often failing nearly every day to write brilliant melodies. The theory of general relativity may have come to Einstein in a flash of frenzied understanding, but only after he had learned every hard lesson imaginable about the possible relations of space and time and let himself be open to optimistic possibility. Creativity is always a learned habit, as well as a rush of blood. “The key,” Tom Kelley argued, and this obviously resonated a lot with us, “is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one.” It was about always being restless for the “Goldilocks moment,” what instinctively feels just right, using that “human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.”
As they grow, businesses tend to be fearful of processes that cannot be simply broken down into their constituent elements. For this reason they tend to be most fearful of all about innovation: Why divert resources from what you know for a fact works to something that no one has tried before? The simple answer to that argument is that there is never in life or in business a steady state. Change is the only constant.
I was mindful, when I tried to establish some consistency in our innovation strategy, of the story of Microsoft’s “lost decade.” The tech giant was born in the spirit of exuberant creativity that saw Bill Gates and his start-up team revolutionize personal computing in a few short years. But after a decade of stellar growth the company had, by 2000, become much more cautious. Internal bureaucracy stifled the innovative energy that originally made Windows, allowing upstarts like Google, Apple, and Facebook to steal all Microsoft’s cool. Infamously, Microsoft marginalized teams that were pioneering prototype e-books and smartphone technology, because its accounting systems and management structure favored optimizing existing products over creating new ones. You could say, given Microsoft’s profits, that the oversight was not consequential, but that would be to overlook the fact that these game-changing advances were gifted to its rivals. Tough Mudder was, of course, working at a very different scale and in a different arena from Microsoft, but the lessons were relevant.
In contrast to that experience I kept in mind the strategy of another behemoth, General Motors, in its launch of the OnStar technology that provides in-car security, navigation, and emergency services to more than six million subscribers.
General Motors was used to patterns of innovation based on the life cycle of cars: things changed slowly and were subject to endless layers of market testing and internal checks and balances before a model was launched. When the opportunity arose to seize some initiative in the fast-emerging market for networked security the company could have used the same processes—and been beaten to market by nimbler competitors.
In fact, GM leadership recognized that a different model was necessary. Against much internal opposition all normal protocols for innovation and market testing were bypassed. Chet Huber, a former military strategist brought in to run OnStar, later lectured about its “disruptive” success at Harvard. “My suggestion early on was that unless we could suspend those GM rules, then we shouldn’t even bother with the business, because we’d end up selling eight-track tapes when everyone else was selling CDs,” he said. GM’s leadership team took note of his suggestion, allowing OnStar to operate as a separate subsidiary within the company. “Had the CEO not been willing to play interference in OnStar’s early years, it never would have succeeded,” Huber argues. He developed this as a lesson: “If you try to do something profoundly disruptive within a company, the core business will probably smother it unless the CEO purposefully ensures otherwise.”
Whether you are building a smartphone or a Tough Mudder obstacle, no prototype ever works the first time. Still, I am constantly amazed how quickly some members of our teams can write off ideas at the first sign of failure. For example, most (if not all) of my management team wanted to kill off our Urban Mudder (now called “TM5K”) concept—a free-running version of the event in city streets—because the first time we put one on it came in over budget. They couldn’t see the potential; they just looked at the numbers in front of them. I mentioned that when Disneyland opened in the 1950s many things didn’t work. Walt Disney had to repeatedly defend his Magic Kingdom to his executives, insist that they give it time, and learn from the parts that weren’t working. TM5K returned, successfully, and with budgetary lessons learned in 2017.
I have often been struck by how people who have been high achievers academically have a disproportionate fear of failure and how this can make them overly inclined to fall back on tried and trusted procedures and products. A lot of these people rise to leadership positions by arguing against risk. We all want to believe we have a degree of control over our lives but some of the overachievers I observed, for example, at Harvard, wanted to take this to extremes. They believed business was about leaving nothing at all to chance. I think again there is a lesson here in Tough Mudder itself. Part of committing to the event is understanding that to enjoy it you accept that you are not completely in control. You can approach it with purpose but you also have to let it come at you.