Maxim #48
Walk the track
Northeast of Toronto, in an unassuming rural town named Bowmanville, is the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park. It is considered one of the world’s most challenging road raceways and over its 50+ year history has had no less than 16 Formula One world champions race around its four-km track. Despite this daunting pedigree, each spring and fall for about the past 10 years, a few of Carpedia’s partners have put their cars and themselves at risk to test their driving skills.
A professional racecar driver chaperones the event. Every year, first thing in the morning, he makes everyone walk the track before anyone is allowed to race. Every year the participants drive their cars towards the first turn, walk the curve and then go back to their cars and head to the next corner. Every year people complain about the repetition and the amount of time it takes, and every year, by the end of the day, everyone is grateful for being reminded of how important it is to walk the track.
The professional driver has raced all over the world in many types of cars and has raced around the Mosport track thousands of times. Yet when he walks around the track and explains the correct driving techniques and the associated dangers of the turn and angles in the road, he does so with a deep respect for the track. Sure enough, sometime during the day – typically after lunch when people are starting to fatigue, someone drops the intensity for just one moment, and learns firsthand why the respect is important. At very high speeds, everything is magnified: the steering, the breaking, the balance of the car’s weight. When you make a mistake at high speed, things can turn badly very quickly. Fortunately, more egos than cars have been damaged over the years.
Not all businesses or professions are life and death, but all organizations have methodologies that are not always followed. At Carpedia, we try to heed this maxim by training our managers to never take for granted the difficulty of navigating change in an organization. Before we ever implement change, we very carefully think through how people will be affected by the change – and develop contingencies if something does not go as planned. When we forget this important step, or overlook it because a change is considered “not significant”, we are usually quickly reminded of the importance of walking the track.
