“Who are our sherpas?”

This question is the one that sticks with me even six years later, and probably will for eternity. In 2019, I had the opportunity to go through the same weeklong Harvard Graduate School of Education summer institute, “Improving Schools: The Art of Leadership” that our organization sponsored school leaders to attend. During one class, about the doomed Mt. Everest expedition John Krakow wrote about in “Into Thin Air,” the professor shared how the climbers did not lean on those who had the most familiarity with, and the greatest knowledge of, the mountain, and decisions that could have saved everyone: the sherpas.

While lowest on the perceived hierarchy, the sherpas were the experts. They had history and experience as their guide. Yet the climbers, with a combination of hubris, other world success, and greater financial resources, relied on themselves. To their peril.

In any organization, one of the first and most important questions to ask when you’re seeking insight, trying to get out of sticky situations, or avoid crises in the first place, is, “Who are our sherpas, and what can we learn from them?”