| (Above) Exploring the largest iceberg in recorded history in Antarctica. Photo credit: Jill Heinerth |
There are no second chances in deep sea cave diving. In the darkness, divers must navigate tight spaces, with no direct access to the surface. Their survival depends on mental discipline, adherence to strict protocols, and extraordinary trust.
No one knows this better than Jill Heinerth, one of the world’s most accomplished underwater explorers. A pioneer in her field, she shared three lessons that can help business leaders today, who are operating under their own extreme environments: navigating new frontiers in AI, battling employee cognitive overload, and heightened stakeholder pressure.
As an explorer, Heinerth regularly leads teams through uncharted territory. Her secret is simple: she believes that encouraging others to take risks starts with us facing our own fears and offering support to those around us.
“I always say fear will show you the way,” she says. “When you step into something that scares you, it means that you care about the outcomes, and you care about mitigating the risks.”
Fear isn’t rejection. It’s care.
This framing invites leaders to reposition fear as a leading indicator of adoption risk, talent retention, and project performance. When there is space to express fear, leaders can help teams separate emotions from the rational, which enables innovation and healthy risk-taking.
Before entering the water, Heinerth gathers her team to review the plan and invites everyone to ask questions, especially those who are new and have fresh perspectives.
In his book Think Again, organizational scientist Adam Grant encourages more “task conflict.” His survey of high-performing startup teams showed that if they disagreed on tasks early on, they had lower relationship conflict.
Leaders can encourage their teams to pressure test the majority opinion by framing work as learning opportunities. In action, this means watching for who’s not speaking, inviting candid feedback, and embracing the possibility of making mistakes.
In high-trust cultures, on both land and sea, individuals are both interdependent and self-accountable, with individuals trusting each other’s expertise, but also taking on the responsibility to understand the systems that they work with, their limitations, and their role in safeguarding them.
During the mission, Heinerth’s team relies on three core commands: Are you okay?, Pause, and Abort.
If a member says “Abort” the mission is over. “Even if it's only three minutes into the dive, we're going back, we're going to the surface—Abort. It doesn't mean I'm about to die, it just means the game is done, we'll talk about it later,” she says.
For deep sea cave divers, the sunk-cost fallacy of—well, we’ve come this far—could cost them their lives. For companies, it could cost billions.
Most leaders are aware of this pitfall, yet once a project is launched organizational systems make it difficult to kill.
Researchers publishing in the Project Management Institute journal found that many organizations lack clear termination mechanisms. To managers, recovery is still plausible and it is unclear what the consequences are for withdrawing. As a result, projects are allowed to create financial drag and are only sunset when it becomes impossible to deny the issue.
Microsoft knows this well. In 2011 they acquired Skype and spent the next 5 years trying to modernize the platform. By 2016, the evidence was clear: the product no longer fit the market. Instead of sunsetting Skype, in 2017 they simultaneously built Microsoft Teams, supporting both tools until Skype was retired in 2025. Keeping both alive cannibalized adoption and cost years of avoidable operational investments.
Establishing pre-set stopping criteria at each stage gate can allow leaders to stop or pivot projects without risking the reputational risk of failure. The same principle can be applied to existing projects and product portfolios. Routinely evaluating products and retiring them based on set criteria removes the emotional, political, and sunk cost fallacies from dictating strategy.
Even with safeguards in place, failures happen.
But what other people call failure, Heinerth calls “strategic intelligence.” That kind of intelligence can only be built through patience and retrospectives that encourage learning and don’t assign blame.
Research from organizational scholar Amy Edmondson shows that high pressure environments paired with high safety improve adaptive problem solving.
Heinerth’s experience shows that what enables teams to innovate is not an absence of fear or even “failing fast,” but creating an environment where fear and failures are examined pragmatically.
By viewing fear as data, accepting dissent, and respecting stopping criteria, organizations can harness fear to overcome obstacles instead of succumbing to it.
Brassel, S., Shaffer, E., & Travis, D. J. (2022). Emotional tax and work teams: A view from five countries. Catalyst.
Baghai, N. (Director). (2024). Diving into the Darkness Never Cave Into Fear. Apple+, Amazon, Google Play.
Grant, A. (2021). Think again: the power of knowing what you don’t know. WH Allen.
Meyer, W. G. (2013). The psychology of project termination. Paper presented at PMI® Global Congress 2013—North America, New Orleans, LA. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/psychology-project-termination-decision-maker-5914
Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.