Extreme Off-Site

The Slide

The part of the adventure in which total immersion is no longer just a concept.

Day Three, early afternoon. From the start, shooting these rapids has loomed as the trip's most-feared event. At the prolonged scout, Quinn pronounces the rapids particularly "flippy.'' The final two waves look diabolical. One faces upstream; the other crashes in from the side at a 90-degree angle.

Until now, this journey downriver had been a metaphor for competing in the Internet economy. Now the trip is just plain scary. A few people ask to ride in the supply boats, which are bigger and less prone to flip. Chris Doyle, a new father who stopped rock climbing after a friend's death several years ago, painstakingly assesses the risk and decides to stay in a paddle raft.

As it turns out, Doyle's boat -- the last one through -- is the one that flips. The crash is spectacular, with the 18-foot boat rising straight up, then toppling over. Doyle is still paddling when the boat plummets from a height of a story and a half. Everyone is dumped, and the white water takes each teammate on a different underwater trajectory. Geller and Tim Shannon, 36, another of the most recent hires, pop up almost instantly. Doyle and Pickering are pulled into the deep and have their sandals ripped off.

"I started to panic, so I began to count underwater,'' says Doyle, who recalled the guides saying a bad dunk might last a few seconds at most. "When I got to 10, I got scared.''

Ten minutes later, it's all over. Led by the guides, the rest of the Altrec team swiftly swings into action, pulling swimmers and gear into the intact raft. Everybody is okay. In fact, everybody is more than okay. If the portage temporarily tore the team apart, the spill brought them back together. There are no epiphanies per se, just the knowledge that they took on something that was bigger than all of them, and they all survived.

The Takeout

The part of the journey in which the real-world adventure begins.

Day Four, a mile away from the takeout at Heller Bar. In the boat and on the beach, Carrick pushes the team to produce an action plan for the first day back at the office. If they don't come up with specific goals, the team building will have begun and ended on the lower Salmon.

What emerges are two items: First, the team devises a plan to scrutinize the current and future roles at Altrec. The tension centers on Pickering. He revised the company's business plan and helped recruit top industry talent. But people can't figure out what he's doing now, or what influence he has on their day-to-day work. Before the trip, neither Morford nor Pickering, who are friends, has had much motivation to resolve what's obviously a prickly situation.

But hours before takeout, the two announce that they'll use an upcoming business trip to hash out the problem. Another team will brainstorm a job description to fill the current leadership void.

As for the second item, the group will begin to draft a road map of four critical team-building areas: decision making, communication, feedback, and respect. Perhaps their most impressive work is how they've zeroed in on decision making. Heading the six-part series of norms: "We trust people to make and own their decisions.''

"Sometimes this group needs to be a team, and sometimes it doesn't," concludes Carrick. "But what the group members always need to be are leaders who are also strong team members.''

After taking on big-time rapids and a turbulent team, Mike Morford can't wait to find a safe harbor back at the office. But he says he's bringing back one big lesson to Bellevue: Leverage, don't cripple, the team's strength. He has assembled a group of aggressive decision makers, and sometimes it's best to skip the consensus building and get out of their way. If it took four days in Idaho to learn that lesson, then hell, they were four days well spent.

Overall, the group is happy with the trip's outcome, but no one hazards a prediction of the river experiment's outcome. Geller, the tech guy who four days ago announced that he gets all the outdoor recreation he needs while mowing his lawn, admits he's glad he made the trip. He got to see people step up and perform in a very public way. But, Geller points out, people still have plenty of proving to do. In six months, if this group of star soloists has found a way to be a team, he'll never say another bad thing about the great outdoors. And that's a promise.

Todd Balf (toddbalf@aol.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor. Visit altrec.com (www.altrec.com), Project Adventure (www.adventureinbusiness.com), O.A.R.S. (www.oars.com), and AlfresCo (www.alfresco.com) on the Web.