Extreme Off-Site

"Do I or don't I have the green light here?" demands Shannon Stowell, general manager of Altrec.com.

"You don't have the team's buy-in," CEO Mike Morford fires back, adding that Stowell's plan is risky and lacks consensus.

It's high noon, and the senior team at Altrec.com, an e-commerce startup that sells outdoor and travel gear, is having it out. But instead of sitting in a climate-controlled conference room at its Bellevue, Washington headquarters, the 10-member team is standing knee-deep in Idaho's lower Salmon River.

The team is three days into a 75-mile rafting descent of the Salmon, one of the wildest, most rapids-choked waterways in the lower 48. Within the towering desert-canyon walls, the July temperature is 100 degrees and rising. A few ominous miles downstream roars the Slide, which at high water is the largest rapids in North America. If the quarrel -- which is about a portage Stowell wants to make, not a $1 million business deal -- continues unabated, the team will have to run the Slide after dark.

In every way imaginable -- on the river and in the marketplace -- the heat is cranked for Altrec. In the eat-or-be-eaten world of e-commerce, Altrec must grow big and grow fast. To do so, it must execute a plan of action at a murderous pace in the coming months. On its to-do list: Find a major investment partner, launch an all-out national-branding campaign, overhaul its Web site, and outsmart two other gear-hawking Internet startups.

But its biggest challenge is to meld a battle-hardened senior team out of a collection of talented but untested players. Of the 10 people here, 6 were hired within the past six months -- 2 within the past five weeks. The newcomers hail from a wide range of companies, such as Nintendo of America and Eddie Bauer. On paper, this cross-pollination of talent should yield a new and evolved creation. In practice, nobody knows one another -- much less how to work together.

Ultimately, the members of Altrec's senior team put themselves on this white water for one reason: They have to. The trip down the river, they hope, will force them into becoming a cohesive team. If it doesn't, they're roadkill.

A little unnervingly, this week's training program is a lot like the Altrec team itself: untested but wildly promising. An adventure-based corporate outing, in itself, is nothing out of the ordinary. Experiential education specialists like Pecos River and Outward Bound have been training corporate teams in outdoor settings for decades. What's new here is that this program is laser-targeted toward business. Altrec hired Seattle-based AlfresCo (a program-management consulting firm), which has allied itself with Project Adventure (one of the leading adventure-based consulting companies) and a pool of top expeditionary outfitters, including O.A.R.S. (Outdoor Adventure River Specialists), the white-water experts who are guiding this trip down the lower Salmon.

The basic concept behind this collaborative venture is straightforward: Let the guides guide and the consultants consult. Project Adventure's Moe Carrick, 37, this trip's facilitator, is a senior consultant whose clients include Starbucks, Nintendo, and Sprint PCS. In the two months preceding this trip, Carrick has met with Altrec's leadership team, completed a comprehensive needs assessment to tease out specific learning goals, and prescribed an expedition: a four-day shoot through the Salmon's churning white water.

In Altrec's case, choosing a bad-ass white-water trip over, say, a breezy cycling tour of Sonoma's vineyards makes sense. In the marketplace, Altrec must navigate a minefield of known and unknown hazards. On the river, they'll need to blast through 10-foot-high waves and dodge punishing, boat-sucking hydraulics. They must adapt to a watery environment that's always moving and changing. In addition, they must complete a five-day trip in just four days.

Between the rapids and the portages, the team will tackle equally tough challenges: Who will fill critical support roles in the organization? Who will call the shots? How do they get beyond the polite, getting-to-know-you stage, so they can give one another no-holds-barred feedback? How can they build the kind of trust that will enable them to make independent, rapid-fire decisions?

Knuckling into those questions will mean holding late-night feedback sessions by campfire. They will forge a six-month game plan for their company. And there will be follow-up: The team will continue to revisit, in conversations back at the office, the takeaways and lessons learned on this odyssey down the Salmon. At least that's the plan.

To get a firsthand look at this experiment in warp-speed team-building, I grabbed my water sandals, entered the unwired void of Green Canyon, and claimed a berth on one of the two Altrec paddle rafts putting in at Hammer Creek. Our flotilla would include three more rafts that carry supplies, five river guides, and a waterproofed library, ranging from the writings of Peter Senge to those of Max DePree. Herewith is a survival guide to extreme team building -- on the river and off.