The Darwin mountaineering expedition in Patagonia: a case of successful leadership failure

Why do some leaders succeed while others fail? The literature on leadership provides a large number of answers to this fundamental question. Successful leadership is generally attributed to the leader themself, the heroic qualities possessed and the capacity to influence followers in order to achieve organizational goals. In this chapter we propose an alternative view of leadership success and failure founded on the basic starting point that success may translate into failure and vice versa. Under unusual circumstances this simple maxim needs to be applied more seriously in order to better understand the meaning of leadership in situations that lie outside the scope of daily experiences. In order to better understand leadership success under extreme conditions, we draw on the Darwin mountaineering expedition, Project Darwin (www.projet-darwin.com). After explaining the expedition we briefly describe three discursive micro-practices - storytelling, world-bridging and justification work - through which the expedition leader succeeded in keeping the team together, even though the climbers did not achieve their primary goal. We then discuss how the notion of 'successful leadership failure' advances the emerging field of leadership-as-practice.