I once conducted a leadership seminar in a swimming pool. It started as a fairly riotous affair with much hearty splashing providing relief from the 40 degree heat of a South African January. It was also remarkable for the degree of freedom people felt in providing feedback on how their management team was working. It was almost as if the cooling water offered a safe, egalitarian medium and a licence to speak out in an unusual setting.
So I was fascinated to visit Snorri’s Pool in the tiny hamlet of Reykholt, Iceland. First of all I had never heard of Snorri Sturluson as a result of my barren ignorance of medieval Icelandic history. Writing 100 years before Chaucer, Snorri more or less created the Icelandic saga canon single-handedly. As an historian, poet and legislator, he is revered in the annals of Scandinavian men of letters. His specialist subject on Mastermind would have been the deeds and lineage of Norwegian kings and his carefully crafted myth-making on behalf of the Norse gods must surely have reserved him a prime spot in the halls of Valhalla. Snorri is and was the stuff of legends.
Legend would have it that he spent many hours contemplating life in his specially constructed, geothermally heated outdoor pool. His very own hot tub. One of the many stories that he captured once he had had a quick rub down with his sealskin wrap and a shot or two of cod liver oil, tells of the building of Asgard, mythical home of the Norse gods.
Very roughly translated the story goes something like this: Odin, top god and CEO of Valhalla Inc, commissioned a new set of protective stone walls from behind which to survey his enterprises. To build this legacy structure, he contracted with the best known construction company of the saga age, run by one Bjarnsson, known to all and sundry as Blast the Builder.
After a tough round of honey and potato vodka fuelled negotiations, the contract was finally drawn up. It specified the height of the new walls of Asgard which had to be completed inside six months or else various penalty clauses kicked in involving the Chief Operating God, Thor, and one of his nasty thunderbolts. When it came to negotiating the memorandum of agreement on payments, Blast drove a hard bargain. In the event of on time completion he wanted the hand in marriage of Odin’s indescribably beautiful daughter and Goddess of Fertility, Freyja. Like all builders, Blast looked forward to the prospect of Friday. Not satisfied with the prize of simply dating the boss’s daughter, Blast threw in two more items of payment, the sun and the moon. As performance incentives go, those two celestial bodies take some beating.
Work on the great outer walls of Asgard began immediately and proceeded rapidly in the first couple of weeks. Blast’s secret weapon on site was his remarkable horse, Svad, who could carry pretty much any load effortlessly, dig tirelessly, plaster at high speed and do fixings in a trice. Sven was the sort of master artisan horse that every small builder craves – show him the plans and he’s away whistling while he works. The walls flew up.
In fact such was the speed and quality of construction that Odin convened a crisis meeting of the project steering committee. There was Aesir, God of the Sea and acting CFO, Thor glowering away, Loki God of Mischief and all other corporate functions and the lovely Freyja herself who was seriously upset for having been included in the contract in the first place and particularly now that it seemed she was destined to become a trophy wife to Blast the Builder. What to do?
It was Loki inevitably, who had been spying on building operations, who conceived the fiendish plan to lure away Svad the horse thus delaying progress just sufficiently beyond the six month deadline. Like many corporate solutions proposed in a crisis, this was greeted with acclaim providing that somebody from corporate got on and implemented it. No problem, Loki was out there performing his mischief in a twinkling and of course, without Svad, the whole building operation ground to a sticky halt leaving Blast scratching his head and sucking his teeth in between chewing his pencil.
And that’s pretty much where Snorri leaves that particular story, with the walls of Asgard incomplete and the only access to the mythical home of the gods and goddesses across a rainbow bridge. Snorri himself probably went back to his medieval jacuzzi to contemplate his next block-buster saga.
Now if he’d been South African and used to holding his seminars in a pool, he’d have invented the creepy-crawlie pool cleaner instead.
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