Building Community
Lessons from Vertical Limit

The Vertical Limit Challenge taught us some crucial learning points about building a sustainable community:

 

Share Resources
Resources are valuable and often limited. Competing over resources leads to scarcity and makes life challenging for those who have to go without. Great leaders know that sustainable communities thrive when resources are shared.

 

In the Sky's the Limit game, when resources became limited, several smart leaders decided to combine their teams. This gave them the resources to meet their goals.

 

Collaborate = Accelerate

Sometimes bad things happen. Hurricanes, tsunamis, fires and earthquakes don't aim themselves at people who deserve it. Everyone faces the risks of these occurrences. The question is what we do in response to those risks and the outcomes of those disasters.

 

One of the great ways to weather a storm is to collaborate. It is much easier to recover, rebuild and get back to work if we do it together. Even better, leaders who understand sustainability, will use each failure or disaster to learn how to rebuild smarter.

 

Don't Compete, Just Win
The Sky's the Limit activity fed into our ego, our desire to be bigger and better. The scarcity of resources, tight time demands and team atmosphere steered us towards competition. Competition can be good when it drives us all to make progress. Competition can also be dangerous when it drives us to waste, control, root for the failure of others,  or even sacrifice the greater good for our own personal gain. I win...you lose.

 

Look for ways to be a clean competitor by thinking long term and ensuring that your success doesn't mean that others must fail.

 

Turn small improvements into "wins" and celebrate progress.