To start at The Kaospilots
By Anders Cornelius Maltha Winther
The scene is set: It is Monday the 29th of August, and a new team is slowly, one by one, entering the courtyard of The Kaospilots. Anxious and excited, ready, yet terrified, we, I being one of them, look around curiously, as if this is not just an ordinary building located in the center of Århus, but rather a seething mixture of brutal anarchy and refined discipline, melted together into an obscure and magnificent force, which can be felt in the air as a vibrating echo of hopes, desires and the willpower to bring them to life.
We are seated in the center of a small auditorium, and presented for the staff and the other teams. There is a constant rumble of talking, laughing and shouting, sounding tremendously loud to us in the middle of the room, as we all sit in awkward silence, not really knowing anybody, and being shy from all this life-force and joy the older students are obviously fulfilled by. And then the teaching begins: But as future Kaospilots, we quickly realize, there is a tremendous difference between learning and being taught. In this particular case, the teaching is a demonstration of the potential of memorization, as a student from the class above us greets every single individual (32 at the time, as the two from South America had not yet arrived) in my new class with his or her first name. Of course, this is possible for most people to do, but to us, it demonstrates the efficiency of the mental training awaiting us, which will enable us to learn faster and more accurately. After a brief introduction to the school and the staff, we are put on a bus, headed for a small place in the countryside, Aasen, a small village near Hjørring, where the new Kaospilots have ventured to every single year with great joy. The hosts are notoriously friendly, even though their guests, at first timid, grow louder and louder as they get acquainted at tremendous speed.
We stay at Aasen for four days, and soon begin to see ourselves as a team. This process from the great “ME” to the great “WE” is further facilitated by the engagement of our team managers Kasper and Gry, whom we soon learn to regard as our new guardian angles. They completely open up their hearts to us, letting us know what they are like underneath the surface, and what their dreams and ambitions are on our behalf.
We all spend four lovely days playing and chatting, getting to know each other’s dirty little secrets, including stories about people pissing in their condoms and making terrible mistakes while visiting Thailand. Besides socializing, however, we are also constantly learning. During the first week, the focus is on control and trust. As the vast majority of the Kaospilots are alpha males or females in the outside world, we have always been used to having it our way. This has made us strongly self-reliant and overconfident. But a team consisting only of this is dysfunctional. So while having fun and getting to know our fellow classmates, we constantly do exercises aimed at improving our trust in other people’s capacities, while reducing our need to be in control. The drills vary from the gentle, where we, as a group, have to do the same motion, without a leader, and without looking at the others, to the more frightening, where we are blindfolded, and then told to run, at full speed, into the waiting hands of our teammates. … And it works: People lower their expectations of themselves, and start to care more about the group as a whole. Quite a lovely feeling, actually.
Thursday, after a marvelous day at the beach, we head home. Tired and matured. And as optimistic about the future at The Kaospilots as never before.