As most of you who have had a chance to connect with me live, sat in on a SafetyCo presentation, or were live at SafetyConverge, you know my daughters are ski racers. With that you will also know, I as an ambitious person and my daughters as competitive humans look to Lindsay Vonn as a bit of a spark of courage, resiliency and maybe sometime of the hard realities of daring to chance what some may call crazy…your dreams. 

As this point all of you will have heard of her horrific crash only 0.17 secs into her storybook Olympic comeback. Some of you who have become fans, may have even heard she crashed 8 days before the Olympics, blew her ACL (significant knee injury) and still choose to take the chance and race in the Olympics.   

This is a condensed version of her words post the crash… 

“Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairytale, it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it.  

Because in Downhill ski racing, the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5-inches. 

I was simply 5-inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash… 

While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets. Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport. 

And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is the also the beauty of life; we can try. I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.” 

As tragic as this was, the more tragic is what happened after she took a chance and jumped. 

The critics, the naysayers, the people who had every comment, every “I knew it would end bad”, and everyone who had an opinion…even uneducated or uninformed ones.   

It seems like 10 days earlier, the whole world believed, there was even an advertising campaign launched with her image the just these letters BE.LV. She did not miss the top 4 in her pre-Olympic comeback and was on the podium in 4 of 5 races. It was a Hollywood story, and everyone in the world was on her side and cheering her on. It was truly the sports and cultural comeback of the century, and every news station, social media channel and human cheers as her biggest fan. 

Until…5-inches changed everything.   

Fans became critics.  The world flip from “you can do it”, to “I told you so”.  Supporter became Judges. All in 5-inches. 

So, what does this have to do with us…with SafetyCo…with our dreams to build something that has never been done? Two things come to mind. 

We are trying to build something that has never been done. We have brought together 5 companies, 5 cultures, and a group of highly driven and experienced people into one culture. We are building new ideas and new solutions. We are implementing technology, creating new roles, new visions, and new outcomes. 

In doing all of this…we are missing by 5-inches many times. 

The business is not going away, the world is not ending, a client is not leaving us, and people still have a great place to work.   

But we missed by 5-inches on Zoho at times, on a new process, on a QuickBooks conversion, on a new idea, on a new program, on a new hire. But we jumped.  We tried.  And we learned. 

On our best day we celebrated the 5-inches as learnings. On our worst day our fans became our critics, the chatter started in the halls, and connection became conflict.  

We all need to think about our 5-inches differently. They are not always easy, some hurt, some are uncomfortable, some even may be a crash. But they are not catastrophic. They are 5-inches of learning and progress. Every time. 

Lastly, I think about the flip from Fans to Critics. From a sportscaster saying, “I love it” to “I knew it”. And I think about how that can be. None of them were Lindsay. None of them had the feeling of just getting to the starts gate. None of them had her ability to not fear, and to focus on the feeling, the outcome and the passion. In other words, none of them were her… 

And yet. No one gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did the right thing, the only thing that made sense to her. It made sense to her…not them. And yet they struggled to understand that because it did not align with their feelings, beliefs or understanding. 

But what if…they gave her the Benefit of the Doubt without Alignment.  What if they could just hold space for the fact there is another idea, another view, another what may seem like crazy idea, that they do not understand in the moment, but gave her the benefit of the doubt without alignment.  Without fully understanding, they gave full benefit of the doubt. 

I think that is something we could all grow with and grow together with.  

BODWA – Benefit of the Doubt without Alignment. 

I would ask in the coming days, weeks and month we all embrace and lead with a bit more BODWA – to connect more with each other and learn more from each other. 

We are not sure what is around every corner or turn in our journey. But we are confident in trying, dreaming and we will keep jumping.  We love our 5-inch odds. 

—Mark Ferrier, President