1997

After college, after a year in China, after several years working with students in the outdoors, after a summer as a mountaineering instructor with Outward Bound, after becoming an EMT and saving over a year’s work by doing a lot of junky jobs, I started an experiential travel company. My thirteen thousand dollars in savings didn’t go far, but that first year I lived out of my car and benefited from the help of lots of friends. They gave me couches to crash on during marketing trips and put me in touch with friends of friends as I looked for new learning opportunities and as I sought out the guides to pull them off. I was twenty-five, with an idea, but little to no experience guiding groups in the developing countries with which I had gained some familiarity. I had a lot to figure out.

As a college student I spent a year in China, in 1987 and ’88. It had only been a few years since China had opened its doors to Western students, and in the year that I lived in China, fewer than 200 Americans had traveled to China for study. At that time, no other foreigners, other than students, were allowed to live within its borders. Officially, there were only a few places where Westerners were welcome to travel; however, students with residency cards and some language ability were able to travel throughout the country. What I saw and witnessed was incredible, and often – nearly always – we were the first foreigners that many people encountered, the country having been walled off shortly after WWII Though easier in the southern part of the country, it was always a challenge to connect with locals – no one spoke English. Our Chinese was slow in coming. But more than that, there was still a lot of suspicion of foreigners, and the government was actively campaigning against the vices of “cultural pollution.”

I took my first group of students to China in 1993, and though much had changed since I was a student, it was still massively challenging to travel through the country, much less have intimate and meaningful experiences with locals. And so in China, and then quickly Thailand, Nepal, India and the rest of south/southeast Asia, I came to understand that the best (and sometimes only) way to access profound learning opportunities came through liaising directly with other young adults who had figured out how to best access experiences in support of their own work/study/volunteer experiences.

That’s not the way most - nearly all - travel experiences had been built. Back, and as it is still now, most travel experiences route through a ground operator. When I started my initial research on travel and study in Asia, I found a number of companies that advertised trips across the Karakorum Highway, from Islamabad, Pakistan to Xian, China. The deeper I dug, the more I discovered that they all ran essentially the same program: staying at the same places, using the same bus companies, and working with the same local guides. There was nothing original or probing, and in a place like China – which was keen to present to foreigners a sanitized fiction rather than a window on hard-truths – there were no attempts to look through the cracks and encounter those hard-truths. In 1993, China was emerging out of universal poverty. It had had years of social/cultural/political upheaval. Bigger groups were required to work through the Chinese state-run travel company, but independent travelers could go anywhere, provided that they could speak Chinese.

So to gain entry to the most amazing parts of the country, and to access intimate moments with locals, I began working with Mandarin-speaking instructors who could facilitate expeditionary learning programs that didn’t rely on the state-run travel company. The results were amazing. And there’s another truth: I really didn’t have a choice but to work directly with Mandarin-speaking instructors, to engage and travel through China as an expeditionary learning program, and to travel with no pre-set itinerary. The reality was that I didn't have enough money to do it any other way. I didn’t have the resources to find and network and build trust with a ground operator. A ground operator would have taken a too-big slice of my budget. And besides, I had learned through my own experiences with NOLS, Outward Bound and other types of expeditionary programming that a small group with a high guide-to-student ratio was foundational to a high-quality experience. Especially when the goals of the program, beyond learning about place, were developing group collaboration skills, leadership skills, and above all critical self-awareness.

In the summer of 1997, the fifth year of running my experiential education and travel company, I ran seven courses. Each course traveled with twelve students, and each course had three instructors. And each course was phenomenal – ridiculously so, with all but a couple of students giving their experiences 10-out-of-10 stars. By all metrics, the courses delivered. There was nothing like it. The work was so good. And as a small business-owner, when I added the income and subtracted the expenses, I had made a profit of $15K – the most I had made yet in any single year. And then my wife told me she was pregnant.

Throughout my professional career, and so clearly evinced in the courses that went into the field in 1997, I’ve seen the extraordinary difference it makes when engaged guides use their skill sets and personal experiences to facilitate deep learning. With seven programs – 21 guides – I could realize exceptional guide-driven programming. But I was working alone and with no supplemental income, I couldn’t support a family on what I had been making. To make things work financially, I had to scale. Scaling meant turning over a lot of authorship. I’d have to empower others with authority, while I would still hold all the risk. The question then – and throughout the rest of my professional career - was: How do you empower remote teams of instructors so that they work together autonomously, make the right risk management decisions, deliver an exceptional curriculum and do it while supporting one-another’s cultural communication styles?

The program directors whom I hired – amazing people and super hard-working – were one step towards ensuring good outcomes. But the curriculum that we developed was the secret sauce. The curriculum got everyone aligned, speaking the same language, sharing an understanding of the goals, opportunities and limitations. And talking with one-another to elevate each other’s performance (in teams that were often made of three different people from three different countries) by respecting one another’s unique cultural communication styles. For that work, a HUGE shout-out to Miki Fire and Emily Braucher, whose years of collaboration led to the iteration of a curriculum that at its finest hour launched 275 students into the field on six-week courses, and only one student returned home early.

In a 30+ year career of working in expeditionary programming, I’ve seen the best results – safer programs, deeper learning, fewer negative impacts – when guides are placed at center. And particularly when an organization invests in creating and maintaining an institutional curriculum that clarifies boundary lines and encourages guides to explore the range of the permission zone.