Last summer, after a few years’ absence, I rejoined my weekly men’s group at church, getting back with a few friends I’d started with 10 years earlier. Like me, guys come in and out as life changes around them, while new faces appear, some of whom I’m still getting to know.

About 3 times a year, our sage leader Scott Owens gives us a break from the study curriculum and schedules a social activity or service project to connect each of us in a different way. Last week, our regular meeting was replaced with an “Escape Room” experience followed by some good Mexican food, brews and spirits.

If you’re unfamiliar with the “Escape Room” entertainment concept, here’s a primer. A group (usually less than 10) pays for the privilege to be locked in a small room equipped with props, clues and tools. Then, you must work together with your teammates to solve puzzles and other challenges to find the key to “unlock” the room for your return to freedom. And it’s a race against the clock – 60 minutes to be exact.

I’d done one of these Escape Room challenges once before and, well, I’ll admit that we experienced the “agony of defeat.” I knew enough about my new teammates to hold much higher expectations this time around. Yet I was still half-joking when I told the site manager to get ready to clear a spot on the lobby scoreboard because we were going to beat the week’s highest scores. 

At the Waukesha (Wis.) Escape Room, our challenge was called the “Blue Ocean Bank Heist.” Our mission was to break into a Cayman Islands bank to recover stolen goods before the notorious master thief moved the contents of the safety deposit boxes to another larcenist. We had to “go in undetected, crack the safe, and escape with the goods with a ‘heist of a lifetime' – in less than 60 minutes.”

As far as teammates go, our group was stacked. Our roster included a manufacturing process engineer, not one but two IT network security experts, a supply chain engineer, a leadership consultant, a computer scientist and a financial services CIO. And then there was a B2B publisher who, if nothing else, could chronicle the evening for posterity (checking that off here today).

Pictured is the “Romans 12” group of bank robbers who restored stolen wealth to their rightful owners. Team flashlight-holder Mike Lessiter is at far right.

It was clear almost immediately we were going to succeed. Our crew had listened to the instructions and went right into action; we were mission-focused. There was no standing around or flapping our gums over “how” to do the tasks. We scattered in search of clues, called out our finds and analyzed the locks, codes and ciphers. We marked our notes on the whiteboard to keep track of what we learned, unsure of when we’d need to use that knowledge for the questions we hadn’t yet come across.

We plowed through each of the main room challenges and quickly opened the bank vault only to find another large room and an equal amount of tasks ahead. It was in the vault that I realized the group was operating the ways you’d want if you could only draw it up that way.

That is, we each figured when to lead and when to follow, and when to let the brains of the operation work without disruption – and to also give them the time to step back and think. And when we got stuck, which happened a couple of times, to ask for a fresh set of eyes. We (“they” if I’m being honest) were like a finely-harmonized symphony. 

That said, we did miss a couple of things that slowed us down. Why? Because we were too heads-down and task-focused to notice the messages that occasionally appeared on the bank’s security monitor. But still, when we finally opened the bank door, we’d recorded the week’s third-best time, with ample time to spare.

Our team’s only fracture point, if you could call it that, came outside of the room when the task was complete. There was a little jarring over which restaurant to hit. But even then we arrived quickly at the Mexican joint around the corner. And the learning continued as we “broke tortillas” and clinked glasses. Like any problem-solving crew worth its salt, the guys traded ideas that would’ve shaved 5 minutes off our time. We’d recorded the third best time of the week, yet didn’t think things had to be broken to still fix it.

Discussing it the next day at the office, I’d suggested it as a possibility for one of Lessiter Media’s monthly social activities. Since then, I’ve started to view it as a good exercise to evaluate the effectiveness of our Leadership Team. A chance for us to see if we can “walk our talk.”

It’s interesting idea for a number of reasons:

• I believe winners like to keep score, but wins aren’t always definitive in business (save for your tractor/combine deal or your techs beating manufacturers’ flat-rate times). In the Escape Room, the clock is ticking. Without the luxury of endless hours, you must get to work. Egos and assumed hierarchy go out the window if you want to complete the mission in 60 minutes or less – because there’s more than an hour’s worth of work to get done.
• Like business and life, you never know what awaits you, nor the order in which the problems and solutions are going to come. That was evident in this exercise, too.
• Failure is not an option in the game. Depending on your mission, failure means you could get forever stuck in an alternative universe, end up in jail … or be tortured by pirates. 

I’m interested to see how our Leadership Team would do in a similar exercise, and also possibly against a team of non-executive employees – if we’re brave enough to compete. Maybe I’ll have a chance to share the results in 2024. Or if you give the idea a shot in the meantime, let us know how it worked out.

Bottom line, the $120 for 60 minutes in the “Blue Ocean Heist Room” was well worth it, as was the conversation over the meal that followed. And the name we gave ourselves – “Romans 12”-- went up on the board for another group to try to bump off.