5 Connections, 5 Insights: 36-40 of 100

Project Horizon is a global conversation experiment by executive coach and high-performance consultant Tim Dutton. It aims to uncover diverse human perspectives by connecting with 100 remarkable people worldwide, linked through six referral-based chains.

ON THE GO? LISTEN TO THE INSIGHTS 🎧

36. Retired British Navy captain, passionate about charity work

37. An American Mormon who’s a director of a manufacturing business

38. Ex-Special Branch police officer who’s seen more life than I ever will

39. A photographer who is trying to reconnect with their passion

40. A humble guy who described himself happily as ‘just a dad’

The retired British Navy Captain was a fascinating conversation for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, his story was inspiring. He had worked his way up through the Navy hierarchy with determination and grit, becoming one of the few to reach the rank of Captain from his particular entry route. After a distinguished career serving King and country, he shifted his focus to charitable efforts, contributing to and directing numerous schemes that support military veterans.

The second reason was the reserved nature of the Captain. At first, I attributed this to two things: age and military background. In my experience, older generations can sometimes be more measured in what they share with a stranger, and similarly, military personnel are often selective about what they reveal. By contrast, younger people I’ve spoken to during this project tend to be more open and forthcoming.

That was my working hypothesis, anyway.

Another perspective emerged as we were closing the call. Toward the end, the Captain asked me about my own background. Conscious of his service, I shared my experience supporting the UK’s elite military units with their human performance. His response was telling: “You must be a good bloke if those guys accepted you.” In that moment, I sensed a shift in tone and warmth.

It was a reminder that establishing credibility is part of the process in this project. And to do this, a personal work-on for me is to become more comfortable talking about myself!

Whilst standing in a piazza in Rome earlier this year, waiting for a walking tour to start, a friendly American family approached me asking if they were in the right place. After the customary “I think so,” I asked the mother where in America they were from. When she said Utah, I suddenly felt like I knew something about the state beyond the Utah Jazz basketball team. ‘Mormons!’, I thought.

I asked her, “There’s quite a large Mormon population in Utah, isn’t there?” She confirmed this and said they were a Mormon family themselves. A ten-minute conversation about Mormon culture and the college sports scene in Utah followed (both of the sons went to Brigham Young University, named after one of the most famous Mormon figures). This was one of the first times I noticed the positive impact Project Horizon was having on my conversation skills. It was giving me ways to connect with people I might not otherwise have spoken to.

So, a few months later, when I was introduced to a successful businessman from Utah, I was curious. Surely, he must be a Mormon, too? Well, even though I had lazily tarred all Utah residents with the same brush, a broken clock is still right twice a day. He was indeed a Mormon, which I worked out when he told me he had grown up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And he was just as lovely as the family I had met in Rome.

I’ll save his story for a later date – my focus here is on something else…

And that is that up until then, my only exposure to Mormonism had been the 2019 West End musical ‘The Book of Mormon’, which satirises the religion. At the time, I’d found it hilarious. But it felt different, years later, to sit with people whose faith I had essentially laughed at without making any effort to understand.

I’m not criticising the musical at all. I enjoyed it. What I’m reflecting on is how it feels now to realise I’d once laughed at a parody of something I knew nothing about. Six years on, I’d like to think I’m a more curious person, and that instead of stopping at the joke, I’d want to seek out the other side of the story.

It’s a testament to the life that Connection 38 has lived that I spent the first 43 minutes of the call listening intently.

Unfortunately for you as a reader, but out of respect for him and his safety, I won’t be sharing any of the stories he told me. What I will say, though, is that in a former career, he was a handler for informants inside criminal organisations. The role of a handler involves the extremely dangerous task of recruiting informants who are willing to divulge valuable information that helps the authorities. The impact of this can vary from picking apart sex and drug trafficking organisations to stopping terrorist attacks.

According to Connection 38, when the challenge of recruiting an informant has been completed, that’s when it starts to get much more difficult. The risks to the informant rise significantly. Therefore, the handler must work hard to keep the informant comfortable and confident to carry out their tasks.

From what I was told, both the recruitment and ongoing handling of informants seemed to demand a depth and breadth of knowledge about human behaviour. Knowledge from time spent in the proverbial trenches, operating under severe pressure. When he spoke, I could tell he was teeming with hard-earned wisdom. Every pearl he shared was accompanied by an enthralling story from his work.

What I took from this was that you can read all the theory you want. It won’t always – and often doesn’t – match up perfectly to the messiness of reality. Growth and success are achieved by taking your ‘knowledge’ and ‘theories’ to your battleground, testing what works, what’s fluff, and creating your own ways of working.

Stress test what you think you know under pressurised conditions.

When I spoke to the photographer, he was in the process of reconnecting with his passion. Life had pulled him away from the photography he really loved for a while, but now he was finding his way back.

One of my favourite pieces of work he shared was a series of shots from the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Ukraine. A deserted merry-go-round in Pripyat amusement park. Abandoned hairbrushes in nearby houses. Photographing locations like Chernobyl was a particular interest of his, part of his fascination with urban exploration, which involves capturing forgotten or decaying structures. In earlier days, he would climb over fences into abandoned buildings just to photograph them. He likes to make the viewer think about what isn’t there anymore through absence in the picture.

He also admits he’s a bit provocative, even cheeky, in his work. For a university project, he set himself a mission. A childhood friend had once left town for Cornwall but never told anyone why or exactly where she had gone. The photographer decided to ‘find her’. Not literally, but to document the journey as if he were.

Being a student, he took a £5 Megabus and stayed in grubby hotels in Bristol and Plymouth along the way. He sat drinking in bars, soaking up his surroundings. Finally, he reached Newquay in Cornwall. Along the way, he photographed mundane details; things he thought an audience might project meaning onto.

When he was finished, he rented an art gallery in Wolverhampton for £50, spent £30 on wine and snacks, and invited his friends and the gallery mailing list. To his surprise, over a hundred people turned up. They stood around debating the depth of meaning in the mouldy hotel window sills he had captured, printed out, and stuck into cheap photo frames.

“I was just messing around,” he said. “I was just playing a trick on the people who’d see it.”

Hearing the story behind the art was fascinating. It reminded me that meaning doesn’t live in the object itself. We create meaning in our own minds, sometimes giving significance to things that may genuinely hold none at all.

This one is easy. And also, an insight that I’ve told many people about since. That’s because it made such an impact on me.

It’s quite common that we describe or introduce ourselves by what we do. Often, this is our profession or our job title. Maybe part of this is that it is more practical than describing ourselves in more abstract ways. A business consultant saying “I’m a problem solver” or an engineer saying “I build things” can come across as vague and make the other person’s brain work hard. So, it can be helpful to give the person you’re speaking to something tangible.

I’ve been conscious of how I’ve been describing and labelling people in these articles. To give the reader a sense of who I’ve connected with in as few words as possible, I have included people’s professions or job titles. That said, I hope you’ve noticed that for many connections, I’ve tried to add an extra layer of description, e.g. “Retired British Navy captain, passionate about charity work.”  I think this at least reflects a little more of the 3D nature of the humans I’ve connected with. (If you have another way of approaching this challenge, please do get in touch!)

Maybe the challenge comes when we leave it at our job title and describe ourselves only by what we do. And, further challenge when we allow that job-title version of ourselves to define our self-identity.

All of this is to lay the groundwork for saying that it was refreshing when I spoke to Connection 40, a nice guy from the UK. His job, just to add a bit of colour, involves setting the schedules for hundreds of people who work at Apple stores around the country. But he told me that when he looked at the Project Horizon website before our call, and saw the list of CEOs, world-record-holders and adventurers I’d connected with, he wondered how he would describe himself.

“I think I’d just say I’m a dad.”

It had me thinking he must be really comfortable with who he is. I wonder how many people nowadays are comfortable enough to say that they’re ‘just’ a parent.

Who are you when we take away your job title? What’s your ‘just’? And what descriptions of yourself are you holding too tightly onto?

These five conversations reminded me that credibility matters in building trust, that when we laugh at something, we should also consider its background, and that real wisdom comes from testing theories under pressure. They showed me that meaning is made in our own minds, and that identity can be defined by who we are, not just by what we do.

Next time: Insights from connections 41–45.