Delightfully Friday Junior: Pick Three

Survival shows aren’t really about surviving. The environment is backdrop.

What keeps you watching are the people — how they think under pressure, what they reach for first, who holds together and who doesn’t.

I tested that theory on our team. Split them into two groups, handed each a picture bank of survival gear — an axe, rope, a pot, fishing net, tarps, a lighter, seeds, a bow and arrow — and gave them a single prompt: You’re stranded on a deserted island. You can take three items. You have ten minutes, and the group has to agree.

Both teams came back with the pot. That one was unanimous — boiling water, cooking, carrying things. Hard to argue with.

Where they split was more interesting. Team one took the fishing net and the lighter. Team two took the tarp and the bow and arrow. On the surface, different calls. But what came out in the explanation was that each team had pushed their items past their obvious use. Team one’s net wasn’t just for fishing — it was for hauling whatever the shoreline gave them, assuming the island would do some of the work. The lighter was a second anchor: fire for water, fire for food, confidence that fish are abundant near an island. Team two dismantled the tarp entirely in their thinking — shelter, yes, but also material for a net, rope, a carrier. The bow wasn’t just for game. The arrowheads were tools.

Same prompt. Same ten minutes. Different mental models of the environment, and every decision flowed from there.

That’s the part of survival shows I actually find compelling. Not the environment — the psychology. How people think through a problem they’ve never faced. What they prioritize when they can’t have everything. How they negotiate when the stakes feel real. Whether they stay coherent as a team or start pulling in different directions. That’s what makes me come back to the next episode.

Work isn’t a desert island. But the skills are the same ones: knowing what tools you actually have, understanding how to push them past their obvious use, making a call when there’s no clean answer, staying functional as a team when the pressure is real. Those aren’t things you figure out once. You develop them across projects, across clients, across the moments where the plan stops working and you have to decide what to do next.

The teams weren’t wrong about their items. They were operating from different assumptions about their environment — and those assumptions shaped every decision that followed.

That’s true of most of the work we do.

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.