Mrs Wyatt, I’m leaving the office…

One of the big influences behind Ashore is a film from the 1980s.

It's called Local Hero.

I think I even bought localhero.io or a similar domain at one point, so we had a lucky escape from a name that sounds like a marketplace for amateur handymen.

Written and directed by Bill Forsyth, it’s about an oil executive from Houston who is sent by his eccentric boss (played by Burt Lancaster) to Ferness, a tiny village in the Scottish Highlands.

His task is to negotiate the sale of the entire village and surrounding area to the company, who have plans to build an oil terminal there.

He’s initially unenthusiastic about the trip. But after being picked up (by a 24 year old Peter Capaldi in his first ever acting role), and taken to the village, something strange happens. Everything seems to be upside down.

The owner of the hotel the oil executive is staying in is also the lawyer that he’s been sent to negotiate with.

Cold War bombers fly overhead, yet a Russian fisherman breezes in halfway through, to check on his investment portfolio and top up the local vodka.

And most importantly, the villagers - instead of fighting to stop the development - are all too happy to take the million dollar payday.

As you might have guessed, it turns out that the topsy turvy world of Ferness is contagious.

Mac, our oil executive, starts to think differently about not only their plans for the oil terminal, but the work he does, and why he does it.

That’s not to say he quits his job and runs off to a cabin in Knoydart to spend the rest of his days. In fact, he works better than ever.

Mac’s boss - sick of the sterility and routines of the company’s Houston HQ, and jealous of Mac’s telephone updates - decides to fly out.

They broker a deal, and buy the village: albeit not for an oil terminal, but for an observatory and research institute (this is probably the reason why it’s Al Gore’s favourite film).

Mac returns to Houston. Back to his flat. And to his job.

We never know if he goes back. The final scene - of a telephone in a box in Ferness ringing - is deliberately ambiguous, and detached.

But we know he’s changed. Spending time in a new place, meeting new people, and taking a step back, has changed his thinking in a way he never could imagine. Hence, Ashore.

Now, Mac initially hates the idea of going somewhere new, and has to be forced into it.

But nowadays, most of us instinctively understand the need to be able to step back, think, plus the value of the unfamiliarity of a new place in helping unlock great work.

Nonetheless, it can still sometimes feel like a leap into the unknown.

When it comes to work, you want to get the job done.

But you have no idea, going somewhere new, if you're going to have the tools and conditions at your disposal to do it.

That's a shame, because this is more important than ever when it comes to a company's success.

This week I watched First Round’s new series of interviews around product-market-fit.

What’s striking (the interview with Vanta CEO, Christina Cacioppo, is a good example) is how the thing that ended up getting them to PMF was never quite the thing they expected.

As Jen Abel says: companies almost only ever find success in an adjacent market to that which they started in.

Or to put it in another way: startups generally fail not because of a lack of execution, but because they’re executing well on the wrong idea.

It’s this need to embrace uncertainty that, for me at least, Local Hero is really about.

Like Mac, we all have to take the leap, accepting that whatever the answer is, it won’t be what we expected it to be at the start.

And so, it’s worth preparing accordingly: making the space within any organisation to step back from time to time, change things up, and think.

For an example of what not making the space for that looks like, you can go to one of Burt Lancaster’s previous films: the Leopard.

An adaptation of Di Lampedusa’s novel, one of the best of the 20th century, Lancaster plays a Sicilian nobleman overtaken by the events surrounding the Unification of Italy.

Whilst the world changes around him, he refuses to change himself. As a result he loses influence, wealth, and his family’s happiness, as others rise to replace him in the nascent Kingdom of Italy.

There are a lot of similarities in the character he plays in both films (a deliberate choice, I think, by Lancaster): both ageing men, stuck in unhappy routines, obsessed with the skies.

But in the Leopard his character sticks to his routines of villas, hotels, and balls, dodging the important decisions. He never makes the jump, and it ends in tragedy.

Therein, lie the two choices.

Make space for uncertainty, ask the questions you’re not sure of the answer to, and see where it all takes you. Or don’t.

You can guess which team I’m on.

aled@ashore.io