In her own words, Cathy O’Dowd wasn’t “born to climb mountains.” As a child in South Africa, “about the most ambitious thing” her parents did was take her to the beach. She saw snow for the first time on a trip to the Alps at the age of 11, where she held on to a little snowball saying, “it’s cold.” Nearly 19 years later, in May 1999, she made history as the first woman to climb Mount Everest from both its south and north sides.
Everest isn’t her only claim to fame, though; she has other firsts to her credit. She's taken a new route to an 8,000-m peak on the Mazeno Ridge, Nanga Parbat, Pakistan. Her team had to cross eight summits to get to the main body of the mountain, and this had never been done before. Her next project is likely to be in Ladakh next year with an “Indian-international team.” The team is working on tying up funds and “the whole package.”
On a quiet weekday afternoon, a bunch of students and professors at the Indian Institute of Technology heard her with great interest. Her journey, to many in the audience, was different but not necessarily alien: academic stress is no less arduous than a Himalayan trek. “Hollywood tells you that the most dangerous thing on the side of the mountain is the killer storm,” she said. “If you find yourself standing on the slopes of a mountain, trying to get to the top, the most dangerous thing is not a storm or avalanche, but yourself and the people you are climbing with, despite the physical logistics and skills training.”
To Ms. O’Dowd, it is ultimately a piece of project management; about highly ambitious people under acute stress in difficult circumstances.
The first South African expedition to Everest in 1996 was originally all-male, a “big, macho physical challenge.” To make the story more interesting, however, a newspaper decided to run a competition to find a woman to join the team. They soon ran a “deeply sexist” advertisement that read, “Have you got the balls to be our first woman on the summit?”
Ms. O’Dowd says she didn’t really care; all she could see was opportunity. She was one of 200 women who applied, and one of two who got selected. “Honestly, we were not expected to get to the top. We were there to look good in the photographs.”
Soon enough, the challenges came in a cascade. Big egos in the group, for one. The team had managed to raise the equivalent of $350,000 in rand. But the week before they left, the rand collapsed against the dollar, and 20% of the budget “vanished.” All the specialised mountain equipment was impounded by Kathmandu Customs. There was no money to even “slide the envelope under the table”. The team nevertheless started walking towards the mountain (the leader’s attempt to stop them from running up hotel bills in Kathmandu, even as he stayed back to fight it out with Customs).
And this is what project management is, really: most of your decisions are made in a hurry, in the face of a crisis. It makes sense in the moment, but loses sight of the big picture: what is going on among your people?
In two weeks, as they covered the beautiful Himalayan mountain ranges, they had a chance to get to know each other, start to work as a team or discover just how much they disliked each other. And when teams get unhappy, a couple of things happen. “People break into little groups. They stick with allies and friends; and you get power plays.” The “boy racers” would grab their rucksacks — “breakfast is for losers” — and run off into the mountains to prove they were better than the others. In such situations, a few members react by backing off. The team leader ends up getting the blame, and rumours are rife. A lot of chaos ensued, which ended with three of the “strongest climbers” — the boy racers — going back home.
The first thing the others did, in rebuilding the team, was ask: What are we trying to achieve? They decided it was about planting the new South African flag as high as they could on the mountain: a clear simple, measurable goal that wasn’t about one person.
The next step was drawing up a strategy, including acclimatising to thin air. “Everyone thinks Everest is a one-way path towards the top. People in life think like that. But you’re going to spend enormous amounts of time going backwards, and back and forth.”
What helped Ms O’Dowd was to occasionally stop and look back, rather than look forward all the time, to put all the negativity and infighting behind her and take confidence see how far she had come. Not to look forward to the summit, but just to the next camp. “Set intermediate goals, take the time to celebrate reaching them; as long as you’re moving it helps.”
Then there’s complacency, the biggest obstacle teams face, when people don’t follow ground rules. In the face of emergencies, how do you resist panic, make your choices and start over? They also learnt how important recognition was as a motivator, and listening to the Sherpas, involving them in decision-making. The final obstacle, she says, is fear. “When you’re looking at the drop and imagining what it’s like to fall.” Instead, you need to look at the ridge and say you know how to climb it, you’re skilled.”
Conflicts need to be ironed out at the outset. “There’s a reason why startups have professional coaches. He helps them have those awkward conversations to stop the spectacular falling-apart.” It’s one thing to speak your mind at Base Camp, and quite another to do so at a height of 8,000 metres, when everyone’s life is on the line. “That is not the time to have a tantrum.”
As the lone woman on the team, she had to learn to speak out, elbow her way through spaces in conversations, and overcome her own inhibitions. There were times when she hated what she was doing, didn’t know why she left home for this. That’s when her coping strategies kicked in: “I knew why I climbed mountains. It’s hard work but I achieve and learn things that I find deeply enriching. I remind myself of the deeper purpose.”
