Farewell Endurance

On March 5, the Endurance, a 1914 expeditionary ship carrying celebrated polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew, was discovered beneath the frigid Antarctic ice. Incredibly, the subzero waters kept the shipwreck so well intact that images taken underwater show clearly the ship’s name above the stern, among many other amazing details.

You may recall in one of my first blog posts that I wrote about how Shackleton’s mission, when judged by its initial goals, was a colossal failure, yet, after two harrowing and massively challenging years, Shackleton and all 28 of his crew returned home alive. The overall story is a great reminder that disaster, or multiple disasters, can be overcome. At the time, I likened it to the need for effective leadership and teamwork during the COVID pandemic.

After almost 100 years of others trying to locate the wreckage, the captain, crew and research team aboard the Endurance22 swiftly accomplished in only two weeks what others dedicated lifetimes to finding. An amazing achievement enabled by today’s technology.

The ship’s discovery has me thinking in a slightly different direction – about transformation. In addition to finding the Endurance intact, the most remarkable part about the finding is what was not in the subzero waters awaiting discovery: the remains of Ernest Shackleton and his crew.

As a group, they were forced to leave, under very dire circumstances, the one entity that had defined their lives, enabled their future successes and represented their only known means of return to civilization. And yet it was clear to them, as the ship was slowly being crushed by the unrelenting sheets of ice, that staying onboard was not an option. And as a result, they embarked on their only path forward for survival.

In many ways, their decision to abandon ship and chart a new path forward was a simple one because they were faced with an immediate issue that demanded change, with looming consequences readily apparent. The case for change is rarely so apparent.

I have spoken and written many times about our imperative to transform – to become more fully a culture of innovation, to flip the script on health care delivery with our patients at its epicenter and doing so by embracing a future fully enabled by digital transformation.

MUSC has done remarkable things over the past five years that have set us clearly on a path of growth, transformation and change – our purpose best described by OneMUSC’s statement of strategic intent: to be a preeminent and innovative academic health system. I believe that these past several years, highlighted by all things COVID, will be viewed as critical milestones in our history as an organization. We have successfully done three things simultaneously as an enterprise – provided care and leadership through COVID; continued our day jobs as a leading academic health system; and, remarkably, charted our course for the future rather than sitting in a state of stasis induced by COVID crisis response. These truths make me very proud of our organization; I’m not sure many institutions can claim the same progress.

I do not mean to imply that any of this is, or will be, easy. Charting a course for the future is a difficult thing to embark upon as an enterprise because success requires culture change. This is more than a willingness to change but real and meaningful actions that place us on this path. And ironically, the case for change is not quite as in our faces as the sound of the ship’s hull cracking – although, it’s equally as real.

“Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all,” Shackleton said. A challenging reality of facing change is the willingness to leave our collective comfort zone (i.e., the deck of the ship) and not only move forward but embrace the unknown (moving through the ice floes) with the certainty and knowledge that together we can and will succeed (return to a new life and future beyond Antarctica). We cannot afford to go down with the ship – the embodiment of the “way we’ve always done it” – or stay in some form of suspended animation, eventually becoming irrelevant.

Shackleton knew that to stand still was to perish. “I chose life over death for myself and my friends... I believe it is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all,” he said. As we continue to explore what lies beyond our institutional horizon, we must leave behind the vestiges of our past, our own Endurance, to be discovered as a unique relic on the bottom of the Southern Ocean.

Farewell Endurance.