by Will Dean
I thought hard, too, about ways we could incorporate these kinds of self-critical habits into our everyday practice. The way I had been allowed to work in the Foreign Service seemed to be a valuable model. My training was often quite abstract, involving role-play and continuous scrutiny to encourage resourcefulness; it impressed on me the need to have high standards of integrity, to be honest about strengths and failings. At age twenty-four, I had been given a complex and highly responsible series of problems about the structures of funding of various terrorist groups and left to work out the best way to dismantle them. Almost anything was possible within certain rules. I became frustrated at one point that I could only withdraw cash that I needed for one assignment by completing a cumbersome and time-consuming docket system. I discovered, however, that the rules allowed me to withdraw a hundred thousand pounds at a time. I bought a twenty-pound safe and some heavy-duty bolts from the local hardware store, withdrew cash up to the authorized limit, and installed the safe under my desk and employed it as required. I wanted Tough Mudder employees to be confident that they could display that kind of initiative at every level, the kind of initiative that was sometimes crucial to negotiating the obstacles in the event itself. The culture was designed both to promote supportive teamwork but also to generate a high degree of personal responsibility. People were encouraged to always look for better solutions to problems rather than accept the answers they had been given.
With this in mind, we introduced a policy of unlimited holiday. At the beginning of the year, after some discussion, everyone at TMHQ is given a set of objectives. And each person is told “if you can get it all done in six months, that’s brilliant; you can take the rest of the year off.” The flip side of that, however, is that each person truly owns his or her objectives. If you don’t believe that you are going to hit the targets, it is up to you to address that fact and to explain precisely the reasons why. The idea was a way of distributing responsibility throughout the organization, even to more junior employees—and it works. Most people see it as liberating, and adapt quickly to the expected level of responsibility. A few get freaked out by not being told what to do. And sometimes people get to take extended breaks.
Again, the practice of the event itself provides a good example of the positive intersection between teamwork and personal achievement. Whatever role people play at Tough Mudder, they are required to work at least one event a year, and ideally—though there is no compulsion—to also run in one. It’s not only a way of muddily connecting everyone with what we do, it also delivers a shared fund of adventures and stories that continually reinforce Tough Mudder culture—if you witness Randy Pierce jumping for the trapeze at King of the Swingers or any of the other innumerable small acts of courage and kindness out on the Mudder course, you return to the office with a greater sense of mission. In the office after each event we circulate stories from the road and try to make sure that everyone in the company understands ways in which their contribution fits in to the bigger picture. As I say all the time, we are not curing cancer—but we are often making meaningful small differences in people’s lives, and we should take pride in that fact.
We like to think these habits and this pride filters through to our tribe. We recently did some research looking at the motivations of Tough Mudders who had taken the pledge in 2015. Their most popular reasons for signing up to the challenge and coming back included “doing something outside my comfort zone” and “introducing others to something awesome” closely followed by “having an epic story to tell,” “connecting with others,” and “defining success for myself.” It’s interesting to note that our internal staff appraisals come up with similar motivations.
In our external research we found that hardly anyone was just there for mud and beer. They said things like, “Something happens at Tough Mudder. It’s like what happens in a natural disaster” (by which I trust they mean it develops a “blitz spirit” rather than “you get cold and terrified and wet”). Or they referenced the insistent “real life” of the event: “Social media is about the past. You’re looking at things that happened. But with Tough Mudder you’re doing it. You’re there.” Often, almost universally, Mudders felt empowered in a way that they could take into the rest of their lives: “There were times when I was going through the pain and I felt like I was getting shot at. It hurt! But now, it goes back to: ‘Oh, I can conquer the world.’”
Communication of such stories is the lifeblood of the culture and the tribe—and it must go in all directions, not just from TMHQ outward, but also from the wider Mudder tribe back into TMHQ. Just as Mudders draw strength from each other out on the course, so we can use their determination and energy to inspire the business. An important part of that is to consistently dramatize the idea of the company to our employees, particularly new arrivals. The Mudders themselves are a crucial aspect of that. Some of it comes from seeding ideas and reinforcing messages out in the wider tribe, whether by viral feeds or direct messaging or face-to-face contact at events. And some of it—perhaps the most effective part—is creating the tools to allow tribal members to share their experience of Tough Mudder and its values with their wider network. In 2012, I said in one interview that we will know when we have arrived as a brand “when a guy goes into a bar and thinks when he tells a girl he’s doing a Tough Mudder, the girl knows what he’s talking about—whether the girl is impressed or not is frankly irrelevant.” Five years on I think we have reached that point—and that increasingly it will be a girl telling a guy she is doing a Tough Mudder.
More than 90 percent of this familiarity has come through social media. When we talk about word of mouth at Tough Mudder, we mean people uploading photographs to Facebook, posting statuses about events, linking YouTube videos, Snapchatting, Instagramming, Tweeting, blogging, and all the rest. We value all those channels in that they have a life and a community of their own. We spend a lot of money each year on Facebook advertising, but these platforms are amplified many times over by the network of users themselves. Social media acts as a connector of tribe members, but it means little without a shared story to tell.
That story inevitably changes a little over time. In some ways, it is relatively easy to be authentic and true to your credo when you are a “disruptive” start-up company, with only a dozen employees. Growth comes with other challenges. Sheetal Aiyer was another of our early hires. I had known Sheetal as a friend in 2002 when he was at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington and I was working as an intern prior to joining the Foreign Office. He came in to help with some contract work at Tough Mudder, and ended up, like Jesse and Alex and a few others, fulfilling many key roles as we expanded. Along with Alex, Sheetal left the company last year to pursue another start-up venture; in his case, at a craft beer company in Brooklyn. I still see him often when I am in New York. He is, like all of us who have been at Tough Mudder since near the beginning, in some ways nostalgic for the excitement of growing something from nothing. It is a feeling that is hard to replicate but one that once experienced is highly addictive.
“Helping build the team and the culture for me was the most fantastic thing,” he says now. “Because it brought together so many different people from different places. Nine times out of ten, people do not truly believe in what they are doing; they don’t wake up every morning thinking they can’t wait to go in to work. But at Tough Mudder in the beginning we just felt every day we were going to grow a bit personally and maybe do a bit of good in the world. I suppose that feeling is what I’m chasing again now. I think I will always be chasing it.”
I don’t think—and I don’t think Sheetal thinks—that that feeling has gone away from Tough Mudder, but it has inevitably evolved as we have gotten bigger and employed more people. In the early days of any company you tend to hire only people whom you would want to have a beer with—and all of you can fit around a bar table. As it grows you employ people who may have very different backgrounds and very different pers
onalities but who still share those original values. The key challenge for me has been to keep that pioneering feeling alive in the organization and beyond, even as we grow. And that comes back to nurturing culture.
I’m a pretty compulsive viewer of TED talks. One that resonates with me is Joseph Pine’s “What Consumers Want.” Pine makes the case that in the past decade or so, what people have come to want above all is not commodities or luxury goods but experiences. Boutique hotels and Disneyland and drinking decent wine and listening to TED talks are all experiences. But the experiences we prize most are the ones that we consider authentic. Businesses selling experiences must above all be true to themselves, by which, Pine argues, “they have to be what they say they are to others.” Or in other words, “if you say you are authentic you better make damn sure you are authentic.”
Our intimacy and connection with the Tough Mudder tribe is both our strength and our early warning system. Constant two-way communication means that if we let Mudders down, in any way whatsoever, they will be extremely quick to let us know, through a variety of channels and media. One result of creating a tribal mentality is that each individual member of the tribe feels, properly, a real sense of ownership of our core values and our business. If you have something tattooed on your chest you want to make damn sure that it does not become fake or sell you out. Mudders believe in us, and like all believers they want above all not to be let down. I have been fascinated by research in how nations build allegiance from their citizens. In relatively young countries, studies show that a very strong investment in the primary or elementary school sector is invaluable—because that is the time and place where children best absorb national values. Argentina and the United States place great emphasis on allegiance to the flag, for example, in ways that many more skeptical Old World Europeans might find a little cringeworthy.
At Tough Mudder we adopted a little of that young-country mentality, with a countercultural twist, and have been successful in making people feel a version of that attachment—through the headband, and the pledge, the commitment of time and courage, the culture of sharing stories. If you run a 10K, it’s probably not your identity; it’s something you did last Saturday. Even if you finish a triathlon you are not primarily a “triathlete.” But if you complete a Tough Mudder, you are a Tough Mudder. People make that fact the prominent descriptor on their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles because it means something, both to them and to their circle—it’s shorthand for a set of values, an attitude to the world. Before smartphones and tablets delivered news, people used to define themselves—in Britain at least—by which newspaper they read. They would carry it face out to show which tribe or class they aspired to. There are fewer such effective tribal signifiers now, but Tough Mudder is perhaps becoming one of them. Among the strangest, proudest moments I’ve experienced, after one of the first events, was being on the New York subway on a Monday morning and seeing a bunch of people heading to jobs in the city wearing their Tough Mudder headbands. Another time, after the first event we had run in the Midlands of England near where I grew up, I happened to park in Worksop behind a guy who had a headband hanging from his rearview mirror. It made me feel strangely emotional to see the orange band in my hometown, and I had to take a photo. The guy understandably came and confronted me to ask what on earth I was doing taking a picture of his car. When I explained, he was suddenly all smiles. If we had not been English we might have hugged it out; as it was, we shook hands.
That kind of personal identification with the idea of the brand means we can never be complacent. As we expand, our authenticity is constantly policed by the Mudder community for signs of deviation from those founding principles. Jesse Bull is now SVP of Brand, and one of his roles is to keep up a 24-7 conversation with the Mudder community, in particular the die-hard legionnaires who have done thirty events or more and who hold us to account if the thirty-second event is not a slight improvement on the thirty-first. This core group has a full-on life of its own—Jesse’s evenings and weekends rarely pass without at least a few urgent comments and questions to respond to.
Sometimes I dip into these conversations, which mostly happen in Facebook groups. It remains a curious thing to eavesdrop on Mudders talking all night about tiny changes in the company, or little tweaks we have made to obstacles or events. There are often heated debates about whether this or that thing—something that might have been changed on a whim six months earlier—represents a departure from our true spirit. Early adopters feel themselves, rightly, to be keepers of the original Tough Mudder flame.
Last year, at the last minute, we decided to put on a ticketed community event at World’s Toughest Mudder in Las Vegas, at which I would give a short talk and thank-you to participants. We had space for only about a third of the fifteen hundred participants and no time to market the event. We sold the tickets, but the funny thing for me was to see the number of Facebook comments afterward about whether it was cool or not to go to the official event or instead “just hang out with the community.” Hold on, I thought, we created the community too!
That sense of tribes within tribes reveals the depth of belonging and ownership among Tough Mudders. One of the case studies I return to most often in our Tough Mudder University is Harley-Davidson—the archetypal example of the way in which people can gather around the authentic values of a brand and have it say something enduring about who they are. Harley-Davidson had created part of that culture by creating covetable motorcycles in a time and place where freedom became synonymous with the open road. The rest of it, however, came from the company’s efforts to nurture community. It sponsored Harley owner’s groups and affiliated chapters that not only organized events and rallies and weekend gatherings but also took part in some community service. There are well over a thousand of these groups across America and the world, with more than half a million members. The case study examined the ways in which over the twenty-five years since the owner’s groups had started, the brand had become for many members almost a full-time way of life and a consistent worldview. When you bought a Harley, you were not just buying a motorcycle; you were buying membership in a community.
One of the most gratifying aspects of what we have done is to see some of this kind of Harley-Davidson tribal spirit being created around Tough Mudder quite quickly in real time. To observe, across cultures and continents, how the values we tried to instill in the business on those first kaizen posters have now been taken to heart and adopted by Mudders the world over. In my more sentimental moments, this feels to me a little like the opposite of the famous “Stanford prison-guard experiments,” beloved of psychology majors. That experiment demonstrated that ordinary people would quickly inflict cruelty on others without question if it were modeled to them. With a few simple mechanisms—the bonding of the Tough Mudder pledge and the anthems at start lines and the architecture of obstacles that encourage teamwork—along with seven years of commitment to a set of values, we seem to have identified a community that consistently spreads camaraderie instead.
One of the defining aspects of this community, I think, is the fact that we have always had many volunteers working at the events. We call them Mudder MVPs or Most Valuable Players. Following the example of Wikipedia, we’ve developed the idea that communities are more likely to form spontaneously when there is an absence in at least part of the system of a financial motivation. Volunteers represent the Mudder idea that we are all in this together. From the beginning, we wanted to incentivize sympathetic people to come and help at our events. We offer a very significant—up to 90 percent—discount on the entry fee to run a Tough Mudder for people who volunteer for a day first. The advantage of this goes both ways—we get a motivated and engaged group of often local people on-site, strengthening our links with the community. And the volunteers have a fun day, get some swag, and get to see our values lived firsthand before they find themselves on the start line.
The idea has proved so popular that we now
have a number of MVPs at each event who turn up cheerfully at five in the morning to help without any thought of going on to run a Tough Mudder. They volunteer just because they love volunteering. Miranda and Guy Richardson, almost ever present at our UK events, are great examples of these super volunteers who have become so vital to the Tough Mudder tribe.
In her day job Miranda is an apprenticeship tutor, helping difficult students settle into their first experience of work. Her husband Guy is a self-employed gas engineer, carpenter, plumber—a handy man to have on-site. Miranda is one of the few members of the tribe who does not have the Tough Mudder pledge but the alternative volunteers’ pledge tattooed on her shoulder. Her story, and her enthusiasm, is not atypical. It began for her in 2012 when Guy ran a Tough Mudder. She saw the volunteer program and signed up for the next event. She and Guy supervised the obstacle called Trench Warfare for ten hours in a wet field—cheering people on, helping a few in difficulty. “On the three-hour drive home, we were both just buzzing from it,” she recalls. “And straightaway I got online and applied for the next one.”
After that they were hooked. They started getting to the site early, on Friday, to help set up, and staying late on Sunday to help pack up. Now there is quite a large network of volunteers that do every event and keep in touch online. The sense of stewardship they epitomize runs deep in the Mudder community. “Just occasionally,” Miranda says, “you get Mudders who don’t get it. A couple of seasons ago we had a bunch of runners we called ‘the glee club’ who seemed to want everything for nothing. They would play the ‘do you know who I am?’ card to new Mudders, try to pull rank, because they had done the event a few times. When that happened, we volunteers made it clear that nobody cared about their egos. They disappeared soon afterward.” People tell Miranda she is crazy to give up her summer weekends putting ice into Arctic Enema or whatever. “But,” she says, “for me just to help get one person over a wall or into the water, one person who turns around and says ‘thank you, I didn’t know I could do that’ makes it all worthwhile.”
