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The Interview
An adventure is a crisis you accept, and a crisis an adventure you refuse
Explorer Bertrand Piccard explains why leaders should motivate rather than convince, and know when to let go of what they think they know....
Explorer and psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard tells Kartik Ashta in an intergenerational conversation that pushing against resistance rarely works and leaders should learn when to let go of outdated assumptions.
Bertrand Piccard grew up in a family where the impossible felt possible. His grandfather, Auguste, made the first flight into the stratosphere in a pressurized cabin. His father, Jacques, descended into the Mariana Trench, the world’s deepest point. Exploration seemed like the natural direction for Piccard to take. There was just one problem: “What can you do when people have gone up and down everywhere?” he said.
Piccard found his answer in the sky rather than the sea. In 1999, he completed the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world by balloon. Then came Solar Impulse, the solar-powered aircraft in which he and fellow pilot André Borschberg took turns flying around the world, not to transport passengers but to convey a message: that renewable energy and clean technologies could achieve what people assumed was impossible.
Now Piccard is attempting another first. Climate Impulse aims to fly around the world non-stop in an aircraft powered by green hydrogen, producing zero emissions. Piccard wants the aircraft to be a forerunner for genuinely decarbonized aviation – and to make hydrogen more desirable as a solution for heavy transport, from ships to trains to planes.
It’s no small task. Keeping hydrogen liquid requires temperatures of -253°C. The aircraft needs to be light, stiff, and aerodynamically efficient. The project will cost roughly half the price of an Airbus and require a complex ecosystem of partners to hold together.
“Once you achieve something, people forget how difficult it was in the beginning,” said Piccard. “They say, ‘Oh, I always believed in it.’ Well, it’s not true.”
For someone who has spent decades pursuing ideas that attracted skepticism before they attracted acclaim, resistance is part of the job.
In management, you tell people what to do and how to do it. In leadership, you tell people why to do it.
Give people something to believe in
Piccard has been working on projects connected with clean technology for more than two decades. Maintaining momentum over that length of time requires more than managing tasks and deadlines. You need purpose.
“In management, you tell people what to do and how to do it,” he said. “In leadership, you tell people why to do it.”
When people understand why they are doing something, Piccard believes their relationship with the challenge changes. A setback becomes not evidence that the project is going wrong, but a reason to search for a solution.
Piccard calls this the “pioneering spirit”: giving yourself permission to think and act differently from what you have learned. But he is clear that pioneering is not a solo run. “You cannot invent on your own,” he said. “You need a team to do it.”
Don’t convince. Motivate.
For Piccard, purpose is only part of the equation. The other is how you bring people with you. “Don’t try to convince. Try to motivate,” he said.
The distinction owes something to another side of Piccard’s life. While his father came from a family that explored what Piccard calls the outer world, his mother introduced him to the “inner world” of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality.
Piccard became a psychiatrist and psychotherapist and trained in Ericksonian hypnosis after a professor dismissed it in a lecture, and he decided to test the claim for himself. What interested him was an approach that worked with the patient and the problem, rather than fighting against them. It also shaped his view of crisis: an adventure, he suggested, is simply a crisis you accept, and a crisis is an adventure you refuse.
A balloon pilot, he explains, cannot change the wind but can change altitude – move higher or lower and another current may be traveling in a different direction. He applies the same logic to people. Trying to convince someone means pushing against the part of them that wants to say no; the harder you push, the more resistance you create.
“When you motivate, you make an alliance with a part of the other one that would be ready to say yes,” Piccard said. From there, the conversation becomes about what both sides might build together, rather than who wins.
He takes the same approach with partners, asking not why they should sponsor his projects but whether they see something they can build together. Some of those relationships have lasted decades: Breitling has supported him for 34 years.
What are you willing to throw overboard?
Piccard’s balloon metaphor resonates beyond motivation. If the wind at one altitude is taking a balloon in the wrong direction, the pilot needs to climb or descend to find another current. To climb, the balloon must become lighter. You drop ballast.
Piccard thinks leaders carry ballast too: certainties, habits, and inherited beliefs that can keep them traveling in the same direction long after circumstances have changed. Experience can tell a leader what normally works. But that knowledge can become constraining when the environment has changed.
Before making a decision or giving an answer, he advises, stop. Notice what you would normally do. Then ask: how could I do this differently? “What can I throw overboard to be at another altitude?” he said. The point is not to reject experience, but to retain the freedom to choose another route.
A different kind of leader
That instinct shapes Piccard’s view of the role of leaders too: “The future leaders need to be very different from the leaders we have today.”
That means thinking beyond the short term, finding common ground rather than deepening divisions, and questioning the assumptions they inherit. It also means thinking much more carefully about what progress is for.
Technology, he believes, should serve people’s quality of life. AI, for example, could help manage electricity grids, balance intermittent renewable energy output, and reduce consumption. Or it could drive vastly greater energy demand and introduce risks. The technology won’t decide which of those futures we get; leadership will.
Piccard rejects the idea that environmental protection and economic performance must pull in opposite directions.
From sacrifice to opportunity
Piccard rejects the idea that environmental protection and economic performance must pull in opposite directions. For the past decade, the Solar Impulse Foundation has identified more than 1,600 solutions to reduce environmental impact while making economic sense. The bridge between the two, he believes, is efficiency. “You earn more, and you pollute less,” he said.
Telling people to stop traveling, consume less, or accept sacrifice is unlikely to produce change at the scale required. Piccard’s approach is to show businesses and individuals what they stand to gain from becoming cleaner and more efficient. If people resist the direction in which you want them to travel, pushing harder is not necessarily the answer. Find another altitude instead.
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