My team once staged an intervention and told me I needed a hobby.

There were about eighteen of them at the time, and they had apparently reached this conclusion collectively. They were worried that work was all I cared about.

They weren't entirely wrong.

So I bought a Groupon for sailing lessons.

At first, I hated not knowing what I was doing

I remember wondering why I had wanted to do this in the first place.

Nothing made sense yet. I was no longer on land. I didn't understand the boat. I didn't understand what the wind was doing to it or what I was supposed to do in response. Everything had new language. I had to collaborate with other people while all of us were moving around in an environment I didn't feel comfortable in.

I had, however, purchased a package of lessons.

So I was going to finish the package.

This probably tells you almost as much about me as the rest of the story.

Slowly, things started to connect.

I learned what the sail was actually doing. I learned why we were trimming it. I learned the points of sail, what the rudder could and couldn't do, and why sometimes, to get where you wanted to go, you had to turn away from it first.

The instructions stopped feeling arbitrary once I could see the relationships underneath them.

Then we caught the wind

One day, with the instructor, we really caught it.

The sail filled. The boat accelerated. The water moved underneath us, and suddenly all of the noise and effort seemed to disappear.

The silence was deafening.

I remember being shocked by it.

We were moving quickly, but it didn't feel frantic. Nothing was grinding or straining. The boat wasn't fighting the wind. For the first time, I could feel all the things I'd been struggling to understand working together.

That's when I fell in love with sailing.

Which, in retrospect, is not surprising.

I tend to fall in love with things once I can feel the system underneath them.

Smooth is not the same as simple

There is a saying in sailing: slow is fast and fast is slow.

Rush a maneuver and a line gets tangled. Someone moves before someone else is ready. You lose the wind you were trying so hard to catch. The attempt to go faster creates the thing that slows you down.

But when the sequence is right, speed can feel almost quiet.

That is what stayed with me. A well-functioning system does not necessarily have less happening inside it. On a sailboat, the wind is exerting force. The sail is under load. Water is resisting the hull. People are making adjustments. The boat is moving.

Smoothness is not the absence of complexity. Sometimes smooth is what complexity feels like when the relationships between the parts are working.

I think this is one reason organizational friction interests me so much. When something isn't moving, the instinct is often to add force: more urgency, another meeting, another approval, another tool, more pressure on the people already pulling the lines.

Sometimes force is necessary.

Sometimes the problem is that the forces are working against one another.

Sailing made that distinction physical for me. You cannot make the wind blow. You cannot negotiate with its direction. You can pay attention to what is actually happening, understand the forces available to you, and position the system so they can produce movement.

And sometimes the fastest route is not straight.

You tack.

You point the boat somewhere that can look, briefly, like the wrong direction because reality will not permit the direct one.

There is a particular moment when the sail fills and the boat begins to move almost silently across the water.

Nothing is straining.

Nothing needs to be forced.

The wind hasn't become less powerful. The system has become better aligned with it.

I think about that feeling more often than I expected to.