Bizcuits | Put fat in the system

Leanda Lee

Macau has a way of giving us crazy life experiences if you so choose to take advantage of the gifts this pearl of a region presents from time to time. Into my dotage I will have the honour of telling about the time that I was a Macau athlete; Macau’s first female single-handed sailor to compete in the China National Games. For this smallish, no-longer youthful academic and erstwhile musician, the physical training – rather than intellectual, creative or technical training that has always been my work – was something very new. I was to face that starting line beside the current Olympic champion and sixteen other twenty-somethings of similar calibre and body-mass. For the first time in my life, I was seriously nervous. This was not my life’s work, this was not what I had aspired to be from childhood, but yet there I was on a new dinghy provided especially by the Macau government, representing the region that had adopted me.
The anxiety was valid. One of the practice days saw 25-knot gusty winds and a 3-metre swell (or so it seemed). My coach had motored out with another team’s support crew disappearing into the whitecaps, my male team-mates had already navigated the treacherous launch, leaving team manager and I to battle the waves breaking onto the ramp. We communicated poorly and missed the timing, badly. My Laser capsized, got swept on its side past the entire flotilla of the cream of China’s sailing elite, hit the harbour wall, nicked its sail at the mast and took a chunk out of my rudder. Somehow I managed to get off that wall, heart pounding and body shaking to face the weather beyond the breakwater.
Emotionally and physically drained – and very angry, frustrated and embarrassed – I was in no shape to be out there. I capsized again, and again; the gusts, waves, sheer weight of the volume of water in the sail and the undertow left me panting on the upturned hull as I was pushed towards the rocks of the breakwater. Never before and never since have I felt so devastatingly helpless. A Chinese safety boat came to my rescue and helped to right the vessel. I was then left to limp back to shore under the watchful eye of the medical boat. I just wasn’t heavy enough, nor sufficiently trained for those conditions. I needed more fat in the system.
This day will stay with me forever: the day I understood that even with extraordinary will, there are times that we just do not have the resources, knowledge, practice, skills, physical or emotional resilience and support from others to keep from failing when circumstances conspire. I was lucky, there was someone there to pick up the pieces.
As in business management, in organisations, teams, individual working relationships and beyond, any number of elements could have been blamed for the situation. None of them would have been right; all of them would have. When the outcomes are good, we attribute success to ourselves: when things go wrong we blame others and things beyond our control.
It’s not about the individual components, however. It was not the inexperienced manager, or the missing mentor, or that I wasn’t heavy enough or skilled enough, or that my exhaustion caused my errors and exacerbated my flailing. It wasn’t that the departmental budget didn’t extend far enough to provide us more equipment, or that my team members were not there beside me to buoy me on, or even the dreadfully tough conditions. It was all of these things.
Determining what and why and fixing the issues without blame, putting a plan together and adding some fat to the system in terms of more people, more skills, more knowledge, better systems, better mindsets and cohesiveness will cover for the eventual breakdowns in the individual components.  It’s the fat that makes individuals, teams and organisations strong.
And the sailing? The remaining competition days were fine. I put up a good fight. I got fit, I gained experience, and I learnt some life lessons, as we all did. And, the team now competes internationally.