An adventurer into extremes

Interview: Emma De Vita

“All explorers are storytellers. That’s our job. Armstrong, Amundsen, Scott – we come back and honestly portray what happened out there,” says Mark Wood. With more than 30 expeditions under his belt, from traversing sea ice in the Arctic to travelling solo in the Antarctic and climbing Mount Everest, the weathered 53-year-old explorer has some jaw-dropping stories to tell. Not only to the thousands of children around the world whom he Skypes on expedition to educate them about their planet, but to anyone who wants to learn from someone who has discovered the truth about leadership, team-building and decision-making by testing himself in Earth’s rawest environments.

On huge paper maps, Wood points to adventures in places like Hells Gate in High Arctic Canada, where he endured temperatures of minus 50, or solo treks across the Arctic, pump-action Magnum shotgun in hand to protect himself from polar bears. But beneath the gripping drama of his adventures lie some hard-won lessons that are universally applicable to any leader and their project.

The death zone

If Wood’s stories reveal lessons from extreme projects, then let’s begin with a real life-and-death situation. Everest’s ‘death zone’ refers to the highest part of the mountain, 7,500m above sea level. The oxygen is so limited that your body starts shutting down – 48 hours is all you have to climb the remaining 1,500m to the summit and come back down. In May 2019, 11 climbers died there in just one week.

In 2013, Wood was one of a team of four on an expedition to reach the summit as part of an education project with Skype and Microsoft. His objective was to make a Skype call to 10,000 children in California (and the tech bosses) once he had climbed to the top.

Two hundred metres from Everest’s peak, Wood and his three team members, including a British doctor and two Nepalese guides, were roped onto a safety line, breathing through oxygen masks.

“You feel knackered. Every step that you take is a thought. If you stand there and think of all the badness about it, you will fail, and you will head back down,” he explains softly. “The mind is an incredible tool because it will allow you to push through things that you feel you are generally not capable of doing.”

That night it was minus 45 degrees with a battering 50mph side wind, but things were going well – the team had found its pace. Wood was second in line, with his Nepalese guides at the front and back, and his doctor just behind him. Then climbers started coming down the mountain telling him not to climb; that conditions were horrendous. “But we were there, at the centre of this project, at the real core of it, and we were working effectively,” says Wood.

That’s when he saw his lead guide drop to his knees and fall straight into the mountain face. “It was pitch black. I went up behind him and pulled him close,” says Wood. “I pushed his goggles back to look at his eyes, which were all over the place.” Leaving him in a sitting position, still conscious but close to dying, Wood went back to find his team doctor. But his doctor was unable to go on, as his feet were frozen, and Wood then saw his other guide abseiling down, away from the situation.

“All of this happened within 20 seconds, and I needed to make a decision,” says Wood. “I looked up and I could see the head-torches of the climbers reaching the summit – I was that close. After 72 days on the mountain, I was that close.” Wood chose to abort the expedition and bring his guide down to basecamp, where he quickly recovered. It was a very close call. After a year of training, Wood’s promises to the schoolchildren and his sponsors lay in tatters.

Decision-making in extremis

There are two forms of decision-making on a project, says Wood. The first is reactive, made with a click of your fingers. “It’s built on experience, training and being in horrible situations,” he says. “That’s the quick decision you make on the spot.” What’s important is to make a decision – inaction can be lethal for any project. “The worst thing you can do is not make a decision, because you are going down a road that isn’t working.

“Instinctively you should know when things aren’t working – that’s when you step back and speak to other people. The key to leading a project is comms, but you need to know how to communicate. If you speak to individuals you get fast, clear reactions. If you put a decision out to everybody, it prompts an opinion and makes it very difficult for everybody to say ‘Yeah, it’s fine’,” Wood explains.

Wrong or right, a decision taken in extremis must be debriefed by everyone in the team if the project is to continue successfully, lessons are to be learned and the leader is to remain in control. The way to do it is to run ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ debriefs, according to Wood. A hot debrief records everyone’s reasoning and feelings when they are still close to the situation (Wood likes to tape these). “To record it in the moment is so important,” he says, because your memories of it will change over time, and you will forget the pressures you were facing.

Wood recommends making a hard copy of the recording, getting everyone to read it and then running a cold debrief a week or two later. “I say, ‘This is why we made these decisions, and if somebody has got something on their mind, this is the place to say it.’ Everybody in the room should have the freedom to say everything they want to say at that point.” These debriefs allow everyone to unpick what happened, make peace with the decision and understand the lessons that will inform the future of the project.

Bringing his team of four together to discuss what went on at the top of Everest was critical for Wood to understand what had happened. He discovered his guide had keeled over because, trying to save money, he hadn’t eaten the right food to sustain him. It could have been prevented if he had spoken to Wood beforehand. The lessons: honesty and communication are key for a project’s outcomes.

360° of frozen nothingness

Honesty, with yourself as a leader and with your project team, is one of Wood’s mantras. He describes the High Arctic, where he has led expeditions to reach the geomagnetic and geographic north poles, as “the most incredible place on the planet”, and a real learning ground. “You stand in the Arctic and it strips away the pretence that you carry around. It exposes who you really are,” he explains, eyes drifting to the middle distance. There is nowhere to hide – it’s where you can learn about yourself, the team and its dynamics. The expedition teams Wood likes best, by the way, are the ones with a mishmash of different types.

“I hate it when it’s all male athletes, because they are the worst team to guide – they are so egotistically driven,” he reveals. “Ego is the big thing to be controlled. Everybody has an ego, but the ego in our environment means that if you get to a point where you are cold and weak, then you need to tell everybody – because if you are weak, you can weaken the team and the whole expedition. A triathlete will want to go on all the time, and it’s about holding that back sometimes.”

Wood admits that his biggest fear on an expedition is finding a reason to give in. “Usually on an expedition you are looking for a way out, for an excuse to get back to comfort,” he explains. “When we’ve done training in the polar regions with big groups of 20 people, and somebody is injured or weak and wants to get out, then we call a plane. You watch how many people want to leave when that plane comes in, and it’s the people you wouldn’t expect – the toughest.”

Discovering your own weaknesses as a project leader can put you at an advantage because you can mitigate them. Wood tells a story of being on a 50-day solo expedition of over 700 miles from the west coast of Antarctica to the South Pole with only his iPod to divert his mind from the 360° of white nothingness. On the second day, he lost his iPod and his ski bindings broke.

“That day, I remember pitching my tent and staying in it for 36 hours thinking, ‘I can’t do this’. I sat in my tent and I broke down. I was looking for reasons to give in. So, I phoned my friend who does a lot of expeditions. I had warned him that I was going to phone him up in the first week and tell him I wanted to abort the expedition. I knew that. Even though I’d done 14 major expeditions before then and some solo work, I knew that my mind would say ‘give in’. So, he talked me back onto my feet, I packed up my tent and I started to ski.”

Leading from the back

The best way to lead a project, says Wood, is from the back. “It can mean physically leading from the back when you can see how your team are performing in a line skiing along,” he explains. “In terms of business projects, you can be great at leading, but you are not the greatest person in the room. You’ve got a team of 20 people because they are very good at what they do specifically.

“You are managing the project, so you see the final outcome, the timeline, and you’re tasking these guys to operate within their own freedom and creativity. If you’re a good enough manager and have been honest with them, they will then come to you and say when they are struggling.” Your job as project manager is to thank them, then ask how you can deal with the problem together. Leading from the back also means planning for things that can go wrong. “Put in a plan B, a plan C and a plan D to compensate,” says Wood. “As a project manager, you are continuously assessing the movement of the project as it’s going forward.”

Wood, surrounded by souvenirs of past expeditions (including bullets, spears and husky dog booties) in his Cotswold cottage, is now planning his next and most ambitious project – Solo 100, which will kick off in 2021 and will see Wood traversing frozen sea ice in the Arctic completely unsupported. A world-record attempt, he has been inspired to give young people a platform from which to talk about climate change.

“I’ll be on this journey that no one has ever done before, which will test me immensely – it will be my pinnacle of exploration. It’s the hardest thing that anyone has ever attempted on Earth.” Now, if that isn’t an extreme project, what is?

Project: Solo 100 expedition

Wood’s latest project was seeded when he was crossing the biggest glacier in the Himalayas in training for another ascent of Everest last year. “I was sat on some ice having a cup of tea, enjoying the sunshine, thinking ‘Isn’t this planet wonderful?’, when I had a text from my manager saying ‘Look at the news’,” he recalls.

It was the day when children across the UK went on strike over climate change in response to environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg’s call to peaceful action. “I thought about my position as an explorer and my responsibility. Rather than just creating Skype classrooms on my expeditions, I needed to create platforms for these young people to have a voice. I wanted to create noise through an expedition where the press would be wowed and then I’d have a platform for these young people to stand on and talk about climate change.”

The project is called Solo 100 and will involve Wood crossing frozen sea ice in the Arctic unsupported for 100 days in March 2021. “Everything I take with me is what I’m going to survive on… no one has really survived over 82 days,” he explains.

Wood is teaming up with the International Scouting Movement. Scouts will be invited to submit short films about their solutions to climate change, one of which will be released on each day of his expedition. It’s down to Wood and his expedition coordinator Suki Gallagher to organise the whole project; the scouts will collate the films. He will spend 2020 putting together his kit, working out logistics and finding the £800,000 he needs to fund the expedition (and, let’s not forget, training).

“Logistics is the hard thing. The main part of my job this year is speaking to the Russians, the Canadians and the Norwegians about the trek,” explains Wood. He also has to piece the financial puzzle together. He has brought two major film production companies on board for Solo 100 – one is actor Tom Hardy’s production company and the other an LA company called Diamond Docs – which are making a documentary about Wood and the Solo 100 expedition.

The crew will film him as he prepares, when he gets dropped off “into the freezer” and covertly halfway along the route so Wood remains out of human contact – not that he minds the solitude. “I detach myself from humanity at every given chance because I like to be alone,” he reflects.

After decades of testing himself in the most extreme environments, you get the impression that this man is entirely self-sufficient and comfortable in his own skin. The suffering he has put himself through has clearly been worth it.

If your organisation is interested in helping to fund Wood’s Solo 100 expedition, please contact his expedition coordinator Suki Gallagher (suki@sukigallagher.com) or go to expeditionsolo100.com