I will never again pour cold water on corporate firewalking

By Sathnam Sanghera for the Financial Times

I had promised myself, after attending a clowning course in 2004, that I would never do anything in the name of corporate motivation ever again. But last Friday evening, in the freezing rain, in a carpark in Nottingham, I found myself walking across burning embers.

The decision to experience the most clichéd of corporate motivation activities came after the publication of a story in the British press about a senior accountant from Deloitte who was injured after firewalking during a team-building exercise. When a blister appeared on her foot the firewalk organisers initially claimed she was suffering from "fire kisses". It transpired that serious hospital treatment was required.

The tale brought to mind several similar incidents: the 30 KFC employees who suffered burns while corporate firewalking in Australia in 2002; the seven insurance salesmen from Eagle Star who needed hospital treatment after attempting a firewalk in 1998; the gaggle of Burger King staff in Florida who suffered severe burns during a corporate firewalk in 2001, giving new meaning to the phrase "flame-grilled whopper".

To find out why companies continue to encourage employees to firewalk, given the evident stupidity of doing so, I arranged for Martin Sterling, a 43-year-old "motivation coach", to give me some training. His company, mib-global.com, has organised hundreds of firewalks for corporations including Microsoft and Tesco, and we met a matter of days after my request - the former martial arts trainer remarking that it would be wise to "strike while the iron is still hot".

Frankly, the preparation he gave me didn't explain why an activity popularised by "empowerment guru" Tony Robbins decades ago was still going strong. Mr Sterling explained it in the normal terms that typifies most training courses nowadays, talking about the importance of "personal sovereignty", how the hero and the coward both feel fear ("but it's what they do with it that separates them") and how "you create your reality with language". But then, before removing my non-matching socks in the carpark, something unexpected happened. Or rather, something expected didn't happen: Mr Sterling didn't launch into shamanistic talk about "protective auras", "dormant resources" and elevating "the frequency of your energy to that of the fire". Instead he explained, rationally, why firewalking is possible: if you use your feet (the skin on the soles is generally 25 times thicker than on other parts of the body) to cross (a certain amount of briskness helps) a short distance of charcoal or wood embers or ash (which are poor conductors of heat), it doesn't hurt.

Suddenly the clouds broke, the sun shone and . . . well, actually, the freezing rain continued pouring, but as I watched the fire being prepared, and then padded across it with no injury whatsoever - the phrase "firewalking" is a misnomer as what you in fact walk across are ashes without flames - everything suddenly made sense.

Before doing it, I would have put the longevity of firewalking down to: 1) the limitless stupidity of some managers; 2) the failure of some managers to digest what newspapers say about the stupidity of such activities; 3) the fact that sometimes everything, up to and including third-degree burns, is better than a day in the office. But now I realise firewalking remains hot because:

• If done properly, it is safe.Mr Sterling's firm has organised 5,000 firewalks over 21 years and claims not to have had a single injury. The day before my effort one of the instructors, Martin Sterling, even walked across hot coals with petrol on his feet to demonstrate the safety of the procedure to a TV crew.

• It is cheaper than many other team-building/corporate motivation exercises such as horse whispering, international folk-dancing, chicken-herding and motorised toilet-bowl racing. A firewalking session for 30 people costs in the region of £2,500, and since organisers can usually travel to where you are, it can easily be added as a finale to away-days or AGMs.

• The analogy between firewalking and business life isn't quite as tenuous as the analogies made by the organisers of other team-building/ corporate motivation activities such as horse whispering, international folk-dancing, chicken-herding and motorised toilet-bowl racing. Even when you understand the science, the mental state you have to put yourself into before taking your first step is not dissimilar to the mental state you must be in when making an awkward sales call, firing someone or preparing for a difficult interview. As a quickie confidence-building programme it has something to recommend it, although I have in the past got a similar buzz from simply daring to enter Wolverhampton city centre on a Friday night.

Which brings me to the final reason firewalking has not fizzled out over the years: people are experiential creatures. Even if the entire world says that something is stupid and pointless and dangerous, there will always be someone out there who wants to find out for themselves. This phenomenon explains a great many things in life, including the persistence of Blackpool as a tourist destination, the success of Jeffrey Archer's novels, and the continued and perplexing existence of corporate clowning courses.

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