NOLS’ “4-7-1” LEADERSHIP MODEL IS BY NOW A FAMILIAR—AND hallmark—element of the school’s curriculum. But leadership wasn’t always taught this way on NOLS courses. Indeed, the 4-7-1 framework for talking about leadership only came about in the late ‘90s, as way of carrying NOLS’ pedagogy into the new century. In the early years of the school, said NOLS Executive Director John Gans, the emphasis was on leading like NOLS founder Paul Petzoldt led, “that larger-than-life style.” There was lots of talk about leadership, but the particulars weren’t well defined. In lieu of an official “instructor notebook,” faculty simply swapped class ideas and copied notes from one another. When Petzoldt left NOLS in 1975, “we lost the one leader that people looked to emulate,” said Gans. By the late ‘70s, instructors were moving away from the “great man” theory of leadership and instead emphasizing a diversity of leadership styles. The template of a 30-day wilderness course looked much like it does now: an emphasis on student autonomy, and a progression toward an independent expedition. But the long shadow that Petzoldt had cast over the curriculum began to fade. “Our culture changed, but the world changed, too,” recalled John Gookin, NOLS curriculum manager. “There was a revolution in ‘flatter’ leadership structures that empowered people to accomplish the organizational mission and objectives.” From the mid ‘80s to the mid ‘90s, there was a push to document NOLS’ policies and curriculum. When Gans became executive director in 1995, after a long career as a field instructor and branch director, he soon set about creating the Leadership Project to define an official, rigorous leadership curriculum. Gans and Board Chair and Instructor Allen Macomber oversaw the project team, which was headed by Molly Doran. The team also included Gookin and Rachel Greene, who would later edit the first Leadership Educator Notebook. Material for the evolving curriculum often came from veteran instructors and faculty newsletter articles. Gookin began to insert business-reply forms into the bimonthly staff newsletter soliciting suggestions. “We weren’t coming up with anything new,” he said. “We were primarily giving language to existing ideas: how do we talk about what we already do on expeditions?” The ultimate goal was to identify the greatest successes of teaching leadership at NOLS and using those to record the school’s written curriculum. Even so, Gookin added, each member of the Leadership Project team was tasked with drawing material from beyond NOLS. Doran brought a wealth of knowledge from psychology, Macomber from his role as a high-level executive at Citibank, and Gookin from the military and religion. The four leadership roles and seven leadership skills came from a long weekend locked in a conference room with the Leadership Project team. The list of proposed skills would steadily grow, and Macomber would firmly insist that it be pared back down. “Allen held us to seven,” recalled Gookin. Thanks to a bit of editorial chicanery, however, “judgment and decision-making” and
More than 254,000 graduates have left the field with a solid grasp on leadership in the past 50 years. NOLS Archives
“vision and action” were allowed to stand as single items. The first edition of the “Leadership at NOLS” pamphlet defined leadership for NOLS after a schoolwide review in 1996. It made no mention of the “one,” or what we today call a leader’s “signature style.” “That emerged a bit later,” said Gans, as the model was field-tested. Instructors realized that even the most comprehensive list of traits couldn’t account for a leader’s particular strengths and weaknesses. “Signature style” was a way of honoring one’s quirks and predilections—the good, the bad, and the ugly— while also building self-awareness of those traits. When veteran field instructor John Kanengieter became the first director of the nascent NOLS Professional Training in 2000, he began to adapt the leadership curriculum for shorter, highly customized courses. From indoor classrooms to outdoor ones, and three-day courses to 30-day ones, the school now had a “language of leadership” it could teach anywhere. Indeed, since the late ‘90s, the model has acquired a nickname (4-7-1) but otherwise remains virtually unchanged. “It had to be rigid, otherwise I don’t think it would have stuck,” said Gans. In other words, no tinkering allowed. There was a push some years ago, he recalls, to rebrand “tolerance for adversity and uncertainty” as “resiliency.” But even that seemed a suspect proposition. If you begin moving the stones of a foundation, what happens to the house built atop it? Gans, who calls the development of the leadership model the “proudest legacy” of his tenure, now smiles when asked if he’s softened on the idea of tweaking its language, if not its actual tenets. “I’ll enjoy watching where it goes,” he said.
Left: The NOLS leadership model is based on the lessons of an expedition, rather than the other way around. NOLS Archives
Summer 2015
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