I remember reading it like it was yesterday. Scrolling LinkedIn like you do, and stopping cold on a post from Grant Rawlinson, “Axe” to most people who know him. I’m reminded of Grant Rawlinson’s crossing of the Tasman Sea every time I hit a wall in my own work, and if you haven’t read it, you should.
Here’s the short version: the man tried to row across the Tasman Sea. Failed. Tried again. Failed again. Tried a third time. Failed again. Then, on the fourth attempt, he and his rowing partner Luke Richmond did it, and not just did it, they smashed the previous record by 9 days. Twenty-two days, four hours and forty minutes across one of the most unforgiving stretches of water on the planet.
I’ve lived in Singapore for 11 years now. I’ve run teams here, and I’ve built two businesses from scratch in this post-pandemic environment we’re all still finding our feet in. And here’s the thing people back home don’t always get: Singapore itself, from the outside, looks like a safe and easy place to do business. Clean, stable, well-run. And it is, in a lot of ways. But the APAC hub market sitting behind it is not easy at all. There’s nothing straightforward about it.
Coming from Australia, I’ve found it genuinely challenging. Not just the cultural elements, though there’s plenty of that to navigate too, but the sheer scale of budget differentiation across the region. What works, what’s expected, what’s realistic, it shifts completely depending on which market you’re standing in that week. Some days it feels overwhelming. Some days it feels insurmountable…
But you persevere. Because, that’s really the only option.
And then you read something like what Grant was able to achieve. Not one failure. Not two. Three successive failures, out on open water, with everything that costs a person physically and financially and emotionally, before he finally got it right. And it puts your own hurdles in perspective. They’re smaller than his, obviously, but the shape of the problem is the same: you keep hitting a wall, and the only way through it is to keep going. Success quite often lies just beyond that final hurdle that trips so many of us up.
A quick word on why this matters beyond the story
So what does Explore Performance, Grant’s company, actually do with all this? They take that adventurous spirit and build it into adventure simulation leadership programmes that are, frankly, unlike anything else I’ve sat through.
And I’ve sat through a lot. Have you ever done the marshmallow and spaghetti tower building exercise? I have. Multiple times, at nearly every company I’ve worked at. I’ll say this plainly: that exercise is a gimmick. It works the first time you do it. Maybe even the second. But once you’ve seen it, and most senior people in a room have, it stops being useful and starts feeling like a mild insult. A disrespect of people’s time, especially for leaders who walked into the room actually looking for tools to deal with real problems, not a group activity with dry pasta.
What Explore Performance does differently is drop leaders into real situations, not manufactured ones dressed up to look real. Real decisions, under actual pressure, that mirror the kind of time crunches these people already live with day to day, sometimes ones that dwarf what they’re used to. So when the real version of that pressure shows up on their doorstep, and it will, they’ve already been there before.
That’s what real leadership development in Singapore looks like.
Dan
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