Chollas

Here’s a picture of a cholla garden in the Mojave desert in California:

Cholla cactus in the Mojave desert. It’s hard to imagine a more challenging environment. The plants themselves have a certain beauty. They look soft and faintly glowing in the picture. But, in order to survive, they have to reproduce. If you have ever walked past a Cholla cactus, you know how they do it. Those lovely little yellow puff-balls break off rather easily. You can’t pass within a meter of a Cholla without having a stickery stowaway stuck to your pant-leg or boot. If you’re a coyote, it’s stuck in your fur. And off it goes to find a new home, to wait 6 or 12 months for the next tiny rainfall when it can take root and grow and sent off new burrs out into the wide world.

Cholla are patient. And they thrive in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. If you want to build a team in the desert (whether it’s the African desert, or the concrete desert), you will have to be patient. Cholla are resilient. Their DNA will last months in the arid wastes of the Mojave. Cholla are adapted to their world. Their spines are barbed so that they will tenaciously stick to whatever they touch: skin, fur, clothing, etc.

If we hope to be successful in building teams in tough contexts, we will need patience, we will need resilience and we will need to be adaptable. How can you build those different aspects into your habits so that they will eventually become part of your character? You can do it, but it will be painful and it will require both intentionality and discipline. As my Québécois friends love to say, “Let’s go!”