Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Toronto Paddlefest 2010: An Absolute Beginner’s Experience

Mountain Equipment Co-0p (MEC) holds something called Paddlefest every year down at Sunnyside Beach. It’s a kayaking, canoeing, paddleboarding, and dragon boating experience open to anyone for a trifling $5 for each 90-minute instructional session. The folks at MEC are passionate about their outdoor sports, and it shows in events like this one. Even for an absolute beginner like me, it was fun and a fantastic learning experience. I should note that I slept incredibly well afterwards, too!

I have zero kayaking experience, so I figured I’d give the event a try. The first part of my adventure began with trying to register for the sessions. I called MEC’s Vancouver 1-800 number to register, and thinking that they’d be 3 hours behind us in Toronto that I’d call them at my noontime, their 9am. That was a mistake. They open at 9:30am Eastern Standard Time. By the time I called 2-and-a-half hours later, many of the sessions were already full. Remember how I said the folks at MEC are passionate about their outdoor sports? So are their members. The advertisement I saw in the newspaper said you can register for sessions on the day-of, but wouldn’t count on actually getting into any of the sessions like that.

I ended up signing myself up for:

• Yoga for Paddlers
• Games for Balance and Fun
• Dragon Boating
• Stand-Up Paddleboarding

I had no idea what to expect for any of them. The Yoga for Paddlers was new for me, as I have as much experience with yoga as I do with kayaking. If you remember, that means “absolutely none.” I had originally wanted to be Intro to Kayaking, but it was absolutely full and I had to find something else for the first timeslot. Maybe you have some yoga experience, but I didn’t know what to expect. My impression now is that yoga is one long, drawn-out stretching session. That’s actually not a bad idea for starting off the day! In fact, I’m probably lucky that I ended up in yoga and getting all stretched out and limber.

Why was I lucky? Because the rest of my day was rather punishing, but in a fun way.

Games for Balance & Fun… somehow tied into kayaking. What would you expect from a session title like this? Well, it’s all about balance games and dumb (but fun) things to do on the outside of a kayak on the water. The instructor was an incredibly irreverent, humorous fellow who also knows a fair deal about kayaking. In other words, he was a good instructor and perfect for this session. The instructor’s opening speech was about how kayakers who would naturally feel no compunctions about walking into the lake and playing in the water suddenly treat the water like hot lava once they’re in the boat. His objective was for us to have fun & get comfortable with the water while being in, on, and around the kayaks.

We began in the water by riding on the outside of the kayak like riding on horseback. That places our centre of gravity a fair bit higher than it would be if we were sitting in the boat properly, so it’s a bit unstable. I eventually got comfortable and decently capable like that, but eventually I fell off and into the water. Getting back on in water, however, is a fair bit more interesting than getting on while at the shore. First, flop up onto the back like a seal. Get your centre of gravity (just below your belly-button) onto the boat properly, then flip one leg over the boat and sit up. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, it took me an hour of flopping into the water over and over again and trying to get it right, over and over again, to sort of get it right!

Other games we tried included, moving to the back of the boat while straddling it, moving into the seat, back out of the seat, standing up on the boat, and even transfering from one kayak to another with a partner. When we got back on shore and the instructor reviewed what we had gone through, the games turned out to be not at all ridiculous. The point was to get us comfortable falling out of the boat, getting back on, and in a rescue situation, transferring from one problem kayak to the rescue kayak.

For me as a beginner, although I kept dunking myself in the lake over and over again, it gave me confidence to know that if I was kayaking normally (I still have yet to try that), I don’t fear the water because I already know how to get back on my boat. Now, getting back onto the boat and into the seat is another matter – I never did successfully do that without flipping over and dunking myself – but at least I know I can get back on the boat and out of the water! I’ll have to play around with the kayak some more when I get another opportunity!

The next session was dragon boating. Wow, that was a workout! I can’t say that it’s the most fun way to get around on the water, but I can now better appreciate the teamwork required to really get one of those suckers moving at speed – and how hard it is to maintain that power and coordination. It’s tiring! It’s very, very tiring! However, it was interesting to learn that it’s not about arm power – the power comes from your abdominals rotating and crunching. However, I have to note that the shoulders do get tired from lifting the paddle out of the water quickly and getting into position, reaching way out and forward. It’s the morning after right now, and my deltoids are indeed noticeably tired, as are my obliques on the side away from the paddle (they were the ones holding me up and out!).

Stand-up paddleboarding is essentially standing up on a board like a surfboard (some are wider than surfboards, others are pretty much surfboards) and using a big long paddle like a mutant canoe paddle to get moving. I have to say that my experience with the kayaks earlier came in very handy. I fell into the lake again and again while trying new things on the paddleboard, and feeling comfortable with getting dunked and climbing back out of the water went a long way towards keeping things fun the whole way through! We first got comfortable with just standing on the boards and moving, then went to learning how to turn, how to modify our stroke to travel straight without switching hands, and finally… a few advanced modifications that guaranteed more dunking into the lake. Each of the modifications meant we stood away from the board’s balance point or pivot point, but gave the board more maneuverability. The downside, of course, is that it also resulted in the board being less stable. I figured I was on the board to learn, so I tried everything the instructor told us to try – even though at some point I had swapped with a classmate and was on a decidedly unstable board!

I am by no means expert at anything after a full day on the lake, but at least now I have a better understanding of what kayaking, dragon boating and paddleboarding are like. More than that, I feel comfortable out there on the water – falling in, tipping in, or in some other way messing up is no big deal. That understanding and that confidence on the water are, I think, well worth the $20 for the whole day of experiences.

All in all, the day was very fun and I recommend everyone try it if they get the chance. If you’ve never been in a kayak, canoe, dragonboat or on a paddleboard, you’ll find it a great new experience. If you already know a bit about kayaking and canoeing, there are some very good intermediate-level and advanced-level sessions available as well. To end off, though, I’ll say that the Games for Balance & Fun session will be good for everyone, regardless of experience level!

Restaurant Review: Chez Laurent @ Yonge & Sheppard

I’ve seen Chez Laurent on Yonge St just north of Sheppard for years. I lived in the area 15 years ago and saw the restaurant there. I figure something that’s been around for that long should be pretty good. Besides, I favor small restaurants and this one has a family-run feel to it. So, I booked a reservation for a party of 6 at Chez Laurent last night and had a uniquely slow experience with lackluster food.

Service was exceedingly slow. The 2 servers on-staff were polite and pleasant, but they had their hands full with the 9 or 10 tables in the place. I have a feeling they were helping out in the kitchen from time to time, because there was (from what I was told) only one cook working in the kitchen yesterday night. Yesterday night was a Saturday night, and I should mention there’s a reasonably well-attended live theatre right near this restaurant. All told, it took us 2 hours from when we ordered 1 shared appetizer and 6 entrees until we finished our meal. No bread came along with the double-platter of escargots, so we had to ask for some bread.  15 minutes later, we got a basket with 4 thick slices of bread. Remember how I mentioned there were 6 of us at the table? We got 4 slices of bread which we split amongst ourselves. Asking for water resulted in a similar test of patience. The servers apologized several times throughout the evening, but for whatever reason the restaurant’s operations were terribly inefficient.

How was the food? The escargots were good. They started us off nicely and reassured me that I’d made a good restaurant choice for this group gathering. Unfortunately, the entrees were disappointing. My lasagna, indicated in the menu as “North America’s best” was okay but not fantastic. I’ve had better, and on menus where no such hyperbole was included. Two of my friends had the pasta special – penne with italian sausage – that looked positively pedestrian. Someone else ordered the fish special with red snapper. It, too, looked astoundingly pedestrian. The osso bucco looked nice, but I didn’t notice any comments about how good it was – that’s unusual for osso bucco because usually when someone tries the dish for the first time, I see some sort of reaction about how meltingly soft, rich, and enjoyable the dish is. No such reaction here at Chez Laurent.

Most damning, I think, was the chicken breast in paprika rose sauce. Thankfully the person who ordered it enjoyed the dish, but I was not so keen on the end result on the plate. The chicken breast was moist, yes, but it was boiled and not properly sauteed. The rose sauce was nice, but there was no noticeable paprika character in it. The pasta side, which the server had said was going to be linguine or fettucine, turned out to be the same penne that the others at the table were having, just minus the italian sausage. The dish lacked flavor and certainly had no character or personality.

Given how long it had taken us to work our way through the meal, and how lackluster everything after the escargots had been, we didn’t stay for dessert. It wasn’t just our table, either – a large table of 9 near us had to get the menus for themselves and I heard them suggest they’d ask for a jug of water rather than risk asking for individual glasses of water. Their meals arrived at the same time as ours, though they ordered around 10-15 minutes later, so something was definitely going on in the kitchen.

I won’t be going back to Chez Laurent, and I recommend against anyone else going there, either. Nice folks there, but unless the food is improved and things sped up dramatically, I’d say stay away. At least from the diners’ perspective, Chez Laurent reminds me of some of the don’t-know-what-they’re-doing restaurants I’ve seen on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares television show. If you’ve ever seen the show, then you know that’s a damning comparison to make.

In Search of Excellence – but Y’Aint Gonna Find It in Government!

Government performs a wide range of absolutely essential services, and many public servants work very hard. However, that alone does not an excellent organization make.

At least in the back-office side of things – if not always the front service counters everyone in the public interacts with – I see people putting in long hours and pushing hard to meet tight deadlines. I hear the folks out in British Columbia aren’t quite so industrious, but at least from what I’ve seen in the Ontario Public Service and from my interactions with folks in various municipalities, people in government work hard. However, excellence is not just about effort expended. It’s about how an organization is structured and how it is built and how it is designed in its very core – down to its genetic code, if you will.

Tom Peters wrote the book In Search of Excellence back in 1988. Sure, that’s over 20 years ago, but the key findings and conclusions still hold:

• Create a “bias for action” by allowing a vast network of informal, open communications
• Support autonomy & entrepreneurship – tolerate & encourage failure
• Be value-driven, with a well-defined set of guiding beliefs
• Stay lean, and keep rules & procedures as simple as possible
• Allow maximum individual freedom while setting a firm central direction

These are foundational principles for agile, responsive, innovative, and aggressively-competitive companies. These are also principles you will not find in government. In our democratic society, it’s because of the fundamental natures of politicians and the voting public.

Elected governments and the bureaucracy that support them are incredibly risk-averse. In direct contrast to General Patton’s military maxim, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week”, government operates with the belief, “A decent plan that upsets as few people as possible executed sometime in the future is better than a more effective plan executed now that might upset people.” Taken to its extreme, it’s really about “Better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing.”

There are rules and procedures galore, and untold levels of sign-offs and authorization required for most activities. The catchword in these hallways is “accountability”, which in practical terms means you need to have everyone above you agree that what you want to do is a good idea. Things have to flow pretty high up before they get okay’d.

You have undoubtedly heard the motto, “Better to seek forgiveness afterwards than to seek permission beforehand.” I believe it to be a good rule of thumb, but unfortunately, government doesn’t work this way. Why? Because the voting public doesn’t think this way.

Politicians are not allowed to make mistakes. If a politician makes a mistake – even an honest one, in an effort to make a real difference, he or she will either be ousted from office or fail to get re-elected next time. The voting public is a tough, unforgiving, and not-entirely-sensible boss. This risk aversion amongst the politicians inevitably colors the culture and thinking in the bureaucracy underneath that supports them and that does the work.

Everything is done to prevent, as far as humanly possible, the very idea of making a mistake or upsetting people. Communication is formal. Failure is not tolerated. Guidance comes from rules and directives, not from an embedded set of guiding beliefs. Procedures are comprehensive and prescriptive. Individual freedom to act is, in many respects, curtailed.

Being a leader, taking the initiative, and being agile and responsive means you will make mistakes. That’s part of the game, that’s just how it works. You can’t learn and you can’t truly lead at the forefront without making mistakes every now and then. In fact, if you ask Thomas Edison or 3M, it’s about making as many mistakes as you can, as cheaply as you can, that leads one to the discoveries that make groundshaking differences. Excellence is built on a foundation of innumerable mistakes and failures – sure, small mistakes, but mistakes and failures nonethless.

The voting public will not allow this. Therefore, the leadership in government will not allow this. Therefore, government cannot and will not incorporate the elements that Tom Peters cites as the building blocks of excellence. If you’re searching for excellence, you ain’t gonna find it in government. It’s unfortunate, it’s a waste of your tax dollars, it’s a waste of lives, health, and ecological vitality, but it is what we the voting public have created by the way we guide government through our outcries and, ultimately, our votes.