I’ve had my consulting business for a couple of years now, and things change when you start consulting. The way you think about work changes. You start to pay attention to things you didn’t notice before, in the industry, at conferences, and online. Your perspective always changes when you get a new job or start working in a new organization. But there’s a fundamental identity change that comes with entrepreneurship, business ownership, and consulting.

Consultants have a bad rap

As an employee, people used to approach me to sell me their services and platforms. When I worked in a school, program providers were always hounding me for my school’s business. As a risk management director, people were hounding me to buy things like security cameras, software and apps, and consulting.

You wouldn’t believe the kind of garbage that comes in my DMs and inbox now as a solopreneur. I should start saving the “best-ofs” for a good laugh on a rainy day.

One time, I got a call at 6 AM on the emergency line. I was on-call so of course I leapt out of bed to answer the phone. The person was trying to find their way into my organization and to the right person, I think they were looking for the Ops Director to sell them some technology platform that would solve all their problems. They knew who I was and they knew my title, “…as the Risk Management Director, could you help connect me to…”

I was livid.

I said to them on the phone, standing in the hallway in my underwear, “Do you really think that’s a successful strategy for you to call the risk management director on the emergency line at 6 am?”

Other sales strategies I loathe:

As a program director inside a school, providers would target teachers and prep them to come and sell me. Gross. Other times, a provider would visit the school and, only at the end of their presentation, ask about my program. Only then would they learn that we were developing our own program and we weren’t in the market for 98% of everything they described.

When I chaired the Wilderness Risk Management Conference, consultants would ask all the time what they should present on. How could I answer that? Beyond your topic area, I don’t really know what you do, or how you even do it. My response was always to come to the conference first. Show up, talk to participants and see the other presenters. Understand the audience and the landscape and the issues, then propose a session where you have a unique perspective or solution.

Invest in the industry before you ask it to invest in you.

I recommend other consultants to people all the time. I have a list in my head of colleagues whose work I value and trust, and whose work I’d trust with my own program. The ones in that group aren’t in it to get rich. Yes, we want to make a living, but if we wanted to get rich, we wouldn’t work in this field at all.

I get the pressure to sell. We live in a capitalist society, and sales is how we survive. Wolves, sheep, kill or be killed, always be closing, Wolf of Wall Street… and all that.

I’m continually learning more about this side of the business and, ultimately, I just want to connect with people and organizations who are aligned with my thinking and approach to risk management, and who might benefit from working together.

That’s it. It shouldn’t be more complicated than that.

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Five things that drive me up the wall

These are my observations about our industry. I hate these things, and if I point them out, perhaps you will see them and hate them too:

1. Overwhelm as a strategy

This is the consultant who stands at the front of the room and tries to overwhelm you into needing their services. Some do it by presenting so much information. Others build the whole presentation from lists of questions meant to point out the things you haven’t thought of or addressed yet.

Gross.

“Do you have [thing]?” “Have you thought about [topic]?” “What if [event happens]?” I’ve sat through sessions on multiple continents where the presenter’s workshop rattled off question after question, with barely enough room to breathe between each one, much less let the audience think about it and how it may or may not apply to their work.

These are all tactical details, not strategy. Yes, plenty of consultants, including myself, are very good at tactical thinking and implementing, which is one part of the value we bring. But that’s not the entire value or purpose of risk management consulting.

At the other end of the overwhelm spectrum is the session that presents so much theoretical information that the practicality is completely lost. The audience tries to keep up, can’t digest it point by point or as a whole, and can’t see how it might change how they think about a topic or issue.

As a rule of thumb, if you can’t translate theory into practice, you’re probably not ready to present on it or use it as part of your advisory.

I wish more conference attendees would see these as design and strategy issues, not pacing or workshop delivery issues.

2. Presenting a problem without a solution

Closely related to the above rant, this one is the hollow presentation where a problem is presented through storytelling, data, or a theoretical framework, but a real, tangible solution is completely absent.

I leave these ones confused.

Is the presenter gatekeeping, and do you have to hire them to close the gap? Or, do they lack the skills/abilities/knowledge/experience to actually resolve it?

I don’t think all presentations should end with action items. Sometimes, the takeaway is a conceptual reframe of an issue or a topic. Whatever the takeaways are, they should be clear to attendees, even if they need more thinking or consultation about how it applies to them.

If the presenter is offering a conceptual reframe, it should be clear how to actually make that reframe yourself as an attendee, and/or how to help your colleagues see a topic or issue differently.

3. The one-way street

This one is for the consultant who doesn’t ask any questions. They don’t take the time, the energy, or the mental space to get to know who they’re talking to. Their message, in either big or small ways, isn’t tailored to the programmatic, geographic, activity, participant, staff, or institutional contexts of the people in the room.

I see shades of this in presentations and at conferences, but I also see it in sales and other interactions. They’re just assuming they know everything about everybody, and that drives me up the wall.

At the end of the day, the consultant’s job is to translate knowledge and information into something actionable so people can act on it and drive change. How on earth can you do that if you don’t ask who you’re working with?

I do think this one goes both ways. As a participant, you have a role in taking knowledge and concepts and applying them to your own program. That’s part of being a professional.

But good consulting involves a more equal ratio of asking and telling.

4. Claiming the impossible

The claim that any training, advisory, or software service can solve risk. That their product or advice can make it safe and leave the client with nothing to worry about.

I just don’t think it’s true.

There’s inherent risk in what we do, and in nearly all strategic, administrative, and operational aspects of programming and leadership. You can’t remove all risk, so it’s a ridiculous claim to make, and it’s irresponsible to sell knowledge or services that way.

This one shows up in the small details. It shows up in the fine print, and in the overall attitude or vibe of a session, a pitch, or a flyer. I’m not sure if the people pushing it are true believers in their almighty powers, or if it’s just lazy writing promoted by persistent AI slop (see rant #5).

As consultants and entrepreneurs, we’re constantly being told that our services should be outcome-driven and solve real-world problems. That’s true to a degree, but all that marketing stuff isn’t necessarily built for the nuanced, intricate world of risk management and safety education.

It’s okay to buy or sell process and process-oriented outcomes. After all, that’s what schools and programs are selling, too.

5. Over-reliance on AI

I was at a conference recently and noticed that, in 4 separate sessions, the presenters’ slide decks were AI-generated. All four presenters were either educational, business/culture, or risk management consultants.

That’s fine if the slide deck presents your own ideas and Claude just helps you assemble it. Visually, I find it pretty boring, and I’m not sure how that helps to distinguish your company from the next guy’s. But in this case, all four had the same slide, presented in the same part of the deck, and used for the same purpose in the larger presentation.

Again: gross.

It was a table referencing academic literature. In all cases, it wasn’t citing specific papers or authors with specific concepts or methods. Instead, it was referencing bodies of work or schools of thought, about 5 or 6 of them each, including foundational authors or landmark books and papers. I think it was Claude’s way of helping the presenter show that their work is broadly supported by the academic literature. Yet, nothing else was cited when they actually got into their materials.

Again: lazy.

It’s another version of “look how smart I am,” without being able to back it up. When you don’t give credit, even in small ways, to the information you are presenting, you let the audience assume the credit belongs to you. Even AI-generated or -assisted frameworks should be cited.

LinkedIn is the same. After the conference, I saw so many posts that said the exact same thing, in the same format and voice, with literally the same sentences. LinkedIn is a cesspool of AI, which is why I started writing on Substack instead.

I’m not in the anti-AI crowd, other than that I despise its overconsumption of natural resources and negative effects on mental health and safety. I genuinely believe those things are solvable with actual governmental regulation and cooperation (this is a conversation for another post). I’m actually proud to say that my work is AI-assisted. I work hard to keep up with how quickly AI is changing, and how it can be responsibly used to improve program and risk management. Note: I did an unofficial test of AI during a program review, and my colleagues and I agreed with it about 30% of the time. So no, it’s not going to take my job just yet, and no, you shouldn’t outsource your consulting/advisory needs to AI, either.

AI writing will continue to creep into our slide decks and documents, and even into our social and spoken language, which I’m noticing, too. But your work has to be authentic enough to be credible, so that I trust it’s yours. I hope you’ll hold me to the same standard.

AI has taken over the internet. Let’s do our best to keep it from taking over our in-person events, too.

Imperfection is fine, as long as it is honest

I don’t think this is black and white.

All of us– practitioners, consultants, academics– are always working out our ideas, and that’s the point of a conference. When we present in front of other people, we’re practicing. We’re trying out how to share and translate, and we’re taking in cues about how our words land with others.

That’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned as a business owner. As an employee, you’re hired to do something, and you try to do it as well as you can because that’s how you get seen and rewarded at work. Consulting isn’t that way. You’re always trying new things and seeing what sticks and what resonates with the people you’re trying to serve.

Consulting isn’t a one-way street. It’s a partnership with the industry and with the people and organizations you serve. So, it’s okay to try new ideas and new ways of talking about things. Perfection is hardly ever the goal.

Our industry has been an extraordinarily authentic place. That’s part of being honest, and it goes back to the mission and pedagogical process of so many outdoor and youth-serving programs: developing the individual by creating an environment where they must contribute to the group and its norms.

Consultants and presenters are no different. We’re individuals contributing to a group and the group’s process of figuring out and articulating all aspects of programming, including risk management.

When the thinking isn’t ours, or it’s shared in a way meant to solely serve our own business goals, our contributions aren’t honest, and our industry’s authenticity diminishes.

Let’s raise the bar

Rant over. Now let’s actually talk about what to do with these observations. Let’s be productive together.

I’m curious if and how you see these things. No need to name names or put anyone down. Let’s start an open conversation aimed at maintaining our authentic nature and practice. For most consultants, it’s why we got into consulting. We believe in our thoughtful programming, and consulting is our way of pushing the collective field forward. We’re all in this bigger mission, together.

As practitioners and receivers of information, we have to question more of what’s showing up in our space. Engage with the information and materials presented to you; don’t be a passive receiver. If it’s not clear, ask where it comes from and what they’d have you do with it.

All of us, as practitioners, providers, clients, thinkers, and doers in our industry, can point these bad habits out to others and raise the bar for all of us.

His question to me was, What am I supposed to do with that? Where do I go from here?

80% of risks are introduced before anyone steps foot in the field

The idea that “risks are introduced upstream” is widely accepted by now. This risk manager has decades of experience and was converted years ago.

Roughly 80% of risks are introduced before anyone sets foot in the field, in the program design and planning stages. It’s true for third-party providers running outdoor education programs, and it’s true for schools running field trips and travel excursions. I wrote about it a few weeks ago in The 80%. When I share this thesis at conferences and staff training, people generally nod along in agreement.

It makes sense, and it’s fairly intuitive. So why do experienced executives, program directors, and risk managers continually skip past it when it comes to learning from incidents and events in their organization? Does the theory not click? Are we not translating well enough from theory to practice?

The guy on the other end of the line was debating with himself. He was trying to decide whether to let it go and let the rest of the investigation run its course, or intervene and provide some mentorship on accident causation and organizational learning.

Let’s try a different approach,

-I said.

What do you think would happen if, when they present their thesis that the instructors had bad judgment and needed more training, you accepted it instead of pushing on it? What would happen if, instead, you followed it up with:

Ok, great. What should change as a result of this finding?

He thought they’d say how they need more qualified staff, better training, and clearer escalation criteria, or a policy informed by medical and mental health experts for this exact type of situation. And that they’d be right that every one of those factors contributes to good or bad judgment in the field.

Great. Now, put on your coaching hat. Now you can ask them about the evidence they’ve found to support those theories, and whether or not they need to do more investigating

Safety leadership is about finding what helps and hinders judgment.

That’s where the actionable learning is. If the investigation stops at bad judgment and decision-making, the organization doesn’t get anything usable. There’s no actionable learning for the budget holders, the hiring managers, the trainers, the schedulers, the partnership managers, or the risk management committee.

In this case, the need for more qualified staff, better training, escalation criteria, and program policy weren’t findings yet. They were asks. The program leadership team already knows their program is missing essential ingredients. Yet, their own investigation didn’t do them any favors. It didn’t give organizational leaders a voice to why those things matter for safety, reputational, or operational risk.

An investigation that ends on judgment does little to improve a program’s resources or infrastructure. An investigation that ends with evidence will often support the normal asks program leaders have of their colleagues in neighboring support and business departments.

Somewhere in your organization, somebody is asking for something they’ve asked for before.

What does your last investigation have to say about it?

P.S. I’ve previously written about the impact incidents can have on everyone involved, from the field to the office staff, and on the organization itself, in After a student death, your staff are victims too.

In the 2000-teens, I directed an outdoor ed program at an international school in Korea. The shelters the student groups slept in were mega mids, which are floorless tarps with a pole in the center. It’s like a mini circus tent, and it only works when the whole thing stays taut.

Our mids were special.

It’s a long story, but we brought the tarps from the U.S., and, for some reason I can’t quite remember, the poles didn’t make it through customs. So, in the early days of the program, we had to source custom-made poles so we could use our new shelters.

The poles never quite worked right. The extension, which is how you’re supposed to make the whole thing taut, would slip after just a few minutes of it being fully erected. The result was a droopy, saggy mid that further destabilized the center pole. The pole would inevitably fall, and the whole shelter would come crashing down on the young people inside of it, who were doing their best to get their Zzz’s before the next full day of adventure and learning.

These things were challenging. However, their lightweight design helped reduce pack weight for students. Additionally, students gained essential craftsmanship skills, such as ensuring everything fits tightly, and developed perseverance by dealing with bugs that slipped through from beneath, as mids don’t have bug screens.

When a pole shifts a little, the shelter goes off balance and the fabric sags. On a good night, the student sleeping closest to the center pole would inevitably be tasked with making sure the thing stayed fully erect, which entails waking up to raise and “lock-in” the extension, or ensuring it stayed precariously stacked on the rocks they’d add beneath it to bypass the extension altogether.

On a bad night, wind and rain would cause the whole mid to come down on a group. Students and instructors would have to get up in the dark, get soaked, and do their best to quickly stash their sleeping bags to stay as dry as possible, and set it back up.

It was like that for years.

The first participants of the program and the school’s early graduates talked about the shelters as a bit of folklore. The younger students coming into the program started their outdoor ed journey utterly terrified.

It was cute, and in some way it made me proud. It was part of the program’s reputation, and it was good that they were telling stories about our courses.

Of course, students and parents complained every year and after nearly every course. I carefully explained that the mids were part of the program’s larger experience and challenge. The challenge was, actually, the point. These weren’t fun field trips; they were experiences designed to push students to overcome social, eco, and physical anxiety. After all, that’s what character development is all about, right?

Then, my own field staff started making the same complaints.

I perked up, because their complaints meant something different to me. They were signals about the program’s overall effectiveness and its very purpose. They offered a simple solution that would change students’ and parents’ whole perception of the program. A few months ago I wrote about staff breaking protocol as data, a complaint from an experienced instructor is the same kind of information.

Tents.

Buy…I mean…invest…in real tents. They have floors, rain flys, guy lines, and poles. They hold up better in the wind and the rain, they keep bugs out, and everyone will sleep better. The *trauma* passed down from grade level to grade level will end.

The head of school immediately approved. Buying a whole inventory of new tents was outside our annual budget, but she didn’t blink. Her own kids knew firsthand the daily mid struggles. We purchased them all from a manufacturer in Korea. Every piece was built for its purpose, and we could just send an annual box of repairs via the local post.

The kids celebrated. My colleague announced to a whole grade level in the auditorium at the end of year, and they literally stood up and cheered.

Holy cow. I misread the whole situation all these years.

Over the next few years, we saw that students and instructors slept better. Anxiety dropped, and engagement and buy-in to the program skyrocketed. The field staff got their nights back. The “learning” and “character development” we protected came at the expense of everything else the program offered. In the end, the staff and students were able to go deeper into the curriculum, and students were able to learn more from the wind, the rain, and the river.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the container your field staff work inside, and about the trade-offs that program directors make to build it.

Program administration is about setting field staff up to succeed. The container determines whether they deliver the learning goals safely and ethically, or spend the night holding up a tent pole and debriefing the kids to “keep pushing through and do it better next time.”

This week, pick one persistent complaint you hear every season. If you do nothing about it, what’s the cost to your program, and the community of people you work with and serve? Then ask yourself, what’s the cost to fix it, in money, time, effort, and pride?

Is it worth it?

P.S. The belief that character is developed through struggle is old and persistent in outdoor education. I wrote about where its roots on my website, in the Struggle as Proof blog.

A multi-month program had just finished, and the group leader was supposed to drive back to the program’s home base, drop off his vehicle, turn in his paperwork and equipment, and go home.

But, he never showed up.

I got a call in the middle of the night, and the staff were starting to get concerned. They weren’t sure just how worried they should be, but something just felt…off. The organization’s policy was to wait 24 hours before escalating, but this one felt different. It’s hard to describe in words, but there was just a gut feeling.

His phone was off, and the vehicle’s GPS tracker, which was supposed to be installed (courtesy of our insurance carrier), was never plugged in. We had no idea where he was.

I called his emergency contact, his father, to let him know the situation and to recruit his help. Perhaps he knew something we didn’t. Perhaps they had been in touch, or he knew of a friend or family in the area who might know more.

Equally concerned and in the dark, we agreed it was time to notify the police.

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The police started their own investigation and dispatched the local sheriff to the campground where the group had ended their program, and local law enforcement to the nearest town. In the back of our minds was a recent national news story from the region about young people going missing. I really hoped our situation had nothing to do with that one.

Author’s note. Trigger warning: the next few paragraphs can be heavy

Eventually, after several interviews and chasing dead ends, the police obtained a search warrant to ping the leader’s cell phone. In the wee hours of the morning, the officer I was working with told me they found him in a hotel room. He was, as it was told to me, “physically okay, and we’re thankful we found him ‘just in time.’”

We found out some time later that the young man was struggling to re-enter “the real world” after his long program. Many readers might identify with the challenge of re-entry after weeks, even months, in the backcountry in small group settings. The vets from Iraq and Afghanistan I used to work with had similar stories and struggles when they returned home after long deployments. Purposefully adjourning and providing closure is perhaps another post for another time.

Thank god the staff decided to raise the alarm before the policy mandated it.

Most of the time, they’re just running late.

Situations where someone is unaccounted for happen all the time.

Sometimes, they “no-show” and just skip the day altogether. Other times, they get turned around or delayed, or there’s a miscommunication about a meeting place or time. But no matter what, there is a period of time before the outcome of the situation is known. There’s a period of time where you might stop and think, “I really hope so-and-so is okay.”

In fact, it’s so common in nearly all aspects of our lives that it’s easy for leaders to overlook the potential seriousness and possibility that the other person(s) are, actually, not okay.

I suspect many readers might think “yes, we know missing people are a big deal, and we have protocols in place for that.”

Good. But I have to be honest, I’ve been surprised at how many programs and organizations don’t have protocols in place. The ones that do have something written down often set a clock like that 24 hours, which is a long time to sit on a bad feeling. I’m continually surprised by how many programs simply expect their staff to be concerned at the right time and figure it out in the moment.

More recently, I looked into a missing group incident at a kayaking program. The expedition leader missed a daily check-in, and the duty officer became concerned, waited 12 hours to hear from the group, then called the Coast Guard first thing the following morning. A few hours later, the Coast Guard found the group by pinging cell phone towers.

Everybody was fine. The group was paddling along and didn’t know anyone was even looking for them. I wrote about some of the learnings from this one in a different post, called she inherited the job, but not the routines.

And, sometimes, everything doesn’t turn out okay. A colleague of mine recently supported a missing person incident for a program, and after the police were notified, they found the person had died a few dozen meters from their cabin.

They were all adults.

When it comes to supervision of children and minors, we’re all over it. It is a Problem (yes, capital P) when we don’t know where a child is. But all of the situations I describe above have one thing in common: the participants and unaccounted-for people were adults.

When someone is in our care, whether a child, an adult participant, or a group leader, we have a responsibility to know where they are. It shouldn’t be left to staff to feel that “something is off about this time,” or to figure out how to conduct a hasty search in real time.

I’m curious, at what point are your staff supposed to raise the alarm, even if they just think someone is turned around or running late?

P.S. Check out Steve Smith’s podcast, Were We Lucky or Were We Good. I told the whole story about the kayak expedition near-miss, and how an organization responds to such an incident says a lot about how mature their risk management program is.

Nobody got hurt, at least not physically. I told the full story in Two Good Instructors, One Bad Decision.

In my office afterward, I asked the instructors to walk me through their day, one decision at a time. Everything they said seemed like a reasonable, rational decision. When I dug deeper, I began to see that every detail pointed at something we decided months, sometimes even years, earlier. By the time they left my office, I wasn’t frustrated anymore. I was embarrassed.

We gave them their itinerary of where to camp each night.

Sure, they could choose a different site, but they had to make it to the takeout we’d pre-selected by Friday. They had to make it there because it’s the information we gave the bus drivers and truck drivers. Changing their pickup location and time was not only a pain (they always threw a fit, even if the location changed by just a couple of miles), it also cost us in penalty fees. And, after all, the kids should be getting a similar river course as the other student groups from the school, right? We had a written policy that everyone would do a water comfort assessment (swim assessment) before paddling downstream. Realistically, that means on day 1 or first thing in the morning on day 2, after an already long day of travel and setting up camp.

I went into the debrief expecting a conversation about instructor judgment. I came out with a deeper understanding of social and cultural norms, and competing priorities and trade-offs. We didn’t have adequate controls for those. We didn’t have an essential safety policy that said no one can enter the river at a certain CFS or in a rising river. It’s no wonder the instructors prioritized the learning goals and itinerary over physical safety. That was on me, the program director. Not them.

In grad school, I thought about this incident a lot.

My research mentor and now friend and collaborator, Dr. Clare Dallat, had just finished her PhD showing that roughly 80% of risks are introduced into the program’s systems upstream, before anyone sets foot in the field (Dallat et al., 2017).

More than just an interesting bit of risk management trivia, this statistic is actually quite instructive. It tells us where to go to learn more, and, as program administrators, where to place our efforts.

Let the instructors use the good judgment you hired them for. But make it easy on them. Give them the right-sized ‘container’, fit to the goals and purpose and tolerance of your program to practice their judgment within. The ‘container’ is built in the design and planning stages, in the off-season, pre-season, and during program preparations, and after the program in the review and reconciliation stages.

The ‘container’ was built by trade-offs. I traded flexibility on the river for lower transportation costs, fewer arguments with drivers, and a course itinerary that looked the same for every group. They seemed like reasonable trades at the time I made them, years before this incident occurred. At some point along the way, each of those decisions just became “the way we do things here.” The instructors inherited them as established rules and boundaries. As a result, they had to work out their own trade-offs standing next to a rising river.

Look around this week.

What trade-offs might you be subconsciously making? Where, among those decisions, is the burden of safety displaced to the frontline, field staff?

Is it still a good trade?

P.S. I wrote a two-part introduction to systems thinking on the blog, Part I and Part II. A program risk review asks the same upstream question across every planning area, instead of one problem at a time. I do those reviews for schools and outdoor programs, and I coach the program directors and risk managers who lead the changes afterward. Reply if you want to talk it through.

Ok, not really. I tell myself on a hard ride or hike, or when I’m gripped on lead 60 ft off the ground, that “this will be a fun story to tell.” And it’s true. I do reflect on my adventures, especially the hard and scary ones, and think “that was fun.”

But there’s something off about the way adventure educators invoke type 2 fun with their students. It hits me so hard because I recognize my younger self in it.

A student stops on the trail and asks why they’re out in the forest and in the rain. Type 2 fun is the easy answer to give.

As a former national risk management director and now advisor, I’m lucky to travel to a lot of programs and observe how their staff are trained and how they conduct their work. I hear similar turns of phrase that travel from program to program. It makes sense, because so many professional instructors work seasonally, in many places and with many programs.

Type 2 fun means that whatever you’re experiencing now– the rain, the wind, the fatigue– is uncomfortable. But when it’s over and you look back on it, you’ll recognize it as a delayed form of fun. Nearly always, it’s said in juxtaposition with type 1 fun, meaning whatever you are experiencing now is, indeed, a good time (like laughing with a group of friends).

I hear it invoked in good faith. But there are a few hidden messages and assumptions behind it, that once understood, I don’t think it would be such a mainstay turn of phrase.

The problem with type 2 fun

It’s a gaslight.

It’s a way to say “suck up and keep going. You’ll be better for it.”

The underlying assumption is that, by pushing through, you’ll develop resilience and grit and build character. It’s part of the story we tell ourselves about how adventure education really works, that by teaching students to ‘push through’ we’re actually teaching them how to cope with stress, instead of manage it.

Does coping with discomfort and stress make us more resilient and build character? No, not really. But learning how to manage it does. I wrote about it in The comfort zone model isn’t in the research.

Telling students that they will one day reflect on this uncomfortable day and it will bring them joy is not a stress management tactic; it’s a coping strategy.

In my field instructing days, I’d say “the great teacher is out,” and gesture upward, to the rain on soggy Pacific Northwest days.

Then I’d follow it with a short lecture about type 2 fun. I’d tell them that when they’re home and warm and cozy, they’ll look back on today and realize that all this suffering was actually fun.

I stopped repeating this line when I realized I was using it more for me than for them. I’d use it to justify turning down the volume on teenager complaints and the mild suffering that comes with carrying a heavy pack for hours on end, and your body is just as steamy and wet on the inside of your rain gear as the air around you.

Type 2 fun is a way to brush them off. It’s a soothing way to tell ourselves that this will all go away, if we just keep our heads down and move forward. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and, perhaps you’ll get to see it someday.

Five alternative ways to encourage students through the struggle

I was visiting a staff training and brought up my issues with Type 2 fun and the underlying messages behind it. Older staff, mainly the staff trainers, were not having it.

How dare I shoot down this sacred cow! And, how else could we possibly encourage students to push through and develop resilience and grit?

Here are five ways to train staff instead:

• Find the underlying issue. A student who is overwhelmed looks a lot like a student who is refusing. “I can’t” could mean they’re scared, or they’re arguing with you, or they’re shutting down. Train staff to respond with curiosity and to figure out what the behavior is trying to communicate.

• Fix the physical stuff first. A student who’s tired, cold, hungry, or dehydrated struggles sooner and recovers slower. Dry socks and a snack do more than a pep talk does. Don’t have dry socks? Teach a way to start drying them, so there’s at least a feeling of agency and control. That’s how to teach stress management instead of coping.

• Let them choose how to participate. A student who doesn’t want to climb can belay, help with safety checks, belay, or backup belay. They’re still involved and contributing to the day’s activities and the group process.

• Show a student the choices they still control. Sometimes, you just gotta hike in the rain. But, there’s still agency and choice in choosing the pace, who they walk with, when they eat, and when they ask for help.

• Tell them what happens next. Type 2 fun is about a distant future, it’s intangible. Instead, keep them in the here and now. Narrate what you expect the next few hours will be like. Answer questions, even if it’s been answered a hundred times. Especially about where we’re going, when we stop, when’s lunch, and what to do about wet feet.

Not every phrase has to go. I still like the line about the sun, the wind, and the rain as the great teacher line. The difference is what comes after it.

Now, I ask, “What do you think today’s lesson will be?”

Instead of promising a delayed lesson, I’m asking them to find something about today.

Parents and schools ask some form of the same question. For adventure education programs, and the nature experiences they offer to be relevant and meaningful for today’s generation of students, we have to be able to answer it honestly.

“You’ll appreciate it later” is becoming harder to accept.

P.S. I want to know what your staff training says about encouraging a struggling student. Send me a note or comment below.

I was the program director at the time, and I heard about the incident afterward, once everyone was back and dry. The kids were shocked, the chaperone was angry, and the instructors were embarrassed.

We all knew it was a near miss that we had to debrief and learn from immediately. The school demanded it. They wanted to know how we would handle the parents once the kids told them.

One of the two instructors knew it was a bad decision at the time. I was confused why he wouldn’t speak up and change the plan.

He was a good boater, so he volunteered to set safety. He didn’t know the kids would all be swept down river, but he felt something was off. He set an unusually far safety, just far enough where he could see and signal to the instructor upstream, yet far enough down where he knew he’d have time to intervene.

In his little blue duckie, he went after all 10 kids and the teacher, one by one. He picked them all up; it was truly incredible. The other instructor kept sending them in pairs, not realizing what was happening downstream. The safety boater downstream was unable to signal to stop sending kids, because he was too busy picking them up.

I felt like we were extremely lucky. Everybody came out completely unscathed. A little shaken, but physically they were completely unharmed.

Before we went home, I closed the door to my office with the four of us: the two co-instructors, the course director, and myself. I listened to their stories and kept asking “why”? Why did each decision make sense at the time?

Then I began to understand. My stomach dropped, and my inner mood shifted from anger and blame to embarrassment. What they say about hindsight is right. It is, indeed, 20/20.

There were several gaps in our program design and planning. I had missed these gaps, and I didn’t realize how much I was relying on the individual competence of each instructor. Competence in reading a river, reading a group, paddling and rescue, and in making decisions together.

While it makes good sense to not swim in a rising river, we didn’t have a policy that said so. They were focused on learning and getting through the first day’s swim assessments, so they could get on with the educational goals of the program. There wasn’t a “no-go” policy that said “don’t swim in a rising river, or above XYZ cfs” they could fall back on that trumped everything else.

Additionally, I had expected the older and more capable paddler to speak up. He didn’t, because, as he said “we’re co-instructors, and I didn’t feel I had the authority to disagree.”

I created the ambiguity in their team, and I didn’t give them a way out.

Outdoor educators tend to like instructor judgment and flat hierarchies. They’re both pretty much synonymous with the individual and partner sports we enjoy that get us into this line of work in the first place.

Everyone is responsible for safety, including the participants and the parents, and I’ll keep saying so. But, when it comes to safety-critical decisions, one person should be accountable for it. Two people who have to navigate their own social perceptions and dynamics to make a safety-critical decision slows down the process and creates gaps that are hard to fill.

Notice, I’m not talking about input here. Single-person accountability doesn’t mean decisions are made without input. Everyone should seek input, give it, and have a veto power. But, one person should ultimately be accountable at every level of the system. This means among the instructor team, among the admin team, and among the senior leadership team.

Policies that aid instructor judgment (like no-go’s), and structure and clarity among roles is one way an organization shows its care for its people. Reducing ambiguity is an often overlooked way of saying “I see you, and I won’t put you in an awkward situation where you are more likely to mess up.”

Somewhere in your program, two people share a decision that one of them should own.

Whose ambiguity is that?

Stu

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P.S. Role clarity and accountability structures are two common findings from program risk reviews. Check out my recent blog post where I outline a few other common findings.

For a long time, programs have been left to translate public air quality guidance to their own context. However, the guidance was never meant for them. The EPA and regulatory and public health agencies assume everyone can simply slow down or stay indoors when the air becomes toxic.

I started this project at the SCA when I was the Risk Management Director. I adopted an air quality matrix from Korea (there were some really nasty days when the AQI monitors would show purple as the bad air settled in from industrial China). We developed national guidance for all of SCA’s programs, but it didn’t yet apply to every program type. We knew it would take several years of testing and learning to hone into good guidance for everyone.

This summer, some states are catching up. Washington’s new guidance is particularly helpful for us. It’s the first public health guidance I’ve seen that specifically accounts for outdoor schools, day camps, and overnight camps. It’s a fantastic starter resource that removes one layer of translation for our world.

There’s one thing I’ve found more state public health guidance is agreeing on. When the AQI is above 151 (in the red), all youth programs and activities should be canceled. This is a stark difference from just 5 years ago, when the advice was to move kids indoors. Now, they’re saying to cancel program activities outright.

Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Minnesota all agree. Yet California, Utah, and the EPA guidance for schools only restrict kids with known conditions at the red AQI level. I’d imagine more will adopt the stricter guidance in the coming years.

As the scientific community learns more about wildfire smoke, public health guidance is becoming clearer, too.

When I worked at the SCA, program staff wanted to know how much time they were allowed to spend in bad air before having to wear masks or move indoors. We didn’t know the answer, and the public health guidance wasn’t as clear about what to do when indoors isn’t an option. There was a feeling that it didn’t apply to us, because it wasn’t written for us.

With clearer guidance becoming more widespread, I’m curious to hear from you. Are your staff still looking for ways to hedge the guidance, to stretch it out to make it less of an inconvenience? Or is your program’s risk appetite for bad air also changing?

Let me know how this summer has been for you.

Stu

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P.S. Brendan Madden, Shana Tarter, and I, from the Wilderness Climate Lab, will host a pre-conference session at this year’s WRMC in Portland, OR. We’ll talk about AQI, and more importantly, we’re asking attendees to join us in outlining questions from our sector and taking a run at drafting clearer guidance for a variety of outdoor program types and situations. I hope you’ll join us.

Lucky for us, George hit the record button and posted it online in his first podcast episode of his series called The Field Debrief.

We talked about a 2010 plane crash in Pakistan, where two qualified pilots flew a perfectly good airplane into a mountain outside Islamabad. We chatted about the case study and what similarities and lessons can be applied to our world, experiential and adventure education programs.

The captain spent the first hour of that flight quizzing and belittling his first officer. Later, on the approach, the first officer raised a problem with the descent, and the captain dismissed it. The first officer kept his mouth shut until the last minute, when the cockpit lit up with warnings of impending doom.

It’s interesting, to me, that the official investigation said he obviously must have felt comfortable speaking up, because he did it once, much earlier in the flight. But I read it a different way. To me, it seemed obvious that he spoke up once, got shut down, and didn’t try it again until it was too late.

Unfortunately, I’m guilty of this too. This case study reminded me of a story from when I was a new program director. A few of my staff approached me to tell me that the way I was responding to a specific instructor was off-putting, and that I was shutting him down in front of everyone. I was clueless and embarrassed. They were right, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

They felt safe enough to come and tell me, and I’m grateful they did. Their feedback gave me a chance to change how I worked with him.

We have deeply embedded assumptions that you must speak up if you are uncomfortable, and when you do, people will correct, and issues will be avoided. We tell ourselves it’s part of the social contract we make with our colleagues in the name of safety. In fact, we even expect the same of our staff and students.

Researchers call this “safety voice,” but our common version is incomplete. In fact, when they went back through hundreds of accidents and the cockpit recordings, they found plenty of crews who raised concerns that nobody acted on.

Who brought you something recently, and what did you do with it? Reach out to that person and ask how it went for them. Would they do it again? As a safety leader, how can you make it even safer for people to use their safety voice?

Stu

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P.S. If George isn't on your radar yet, he's worth following. He's building Field Risk OS, a program management platform for expedition programs, and The Field Debrief is his new podcast and blog. Spend a few clicks on his site. I'm glad he's putting this stuff out into our field.

I got some of the best advice I've ever received. As many readers are in the middle of summer's busy season, I'd like to pass it on to you.

Mark Vermeal (a subscriber here) had the job in the late 2000s. He told me they were going to come at me ten million different ways. Every department, every program, every executive, and every board member would need something, and every one of them would frame their thing as the most urgent thing.

His advice was to take some time to figure out my one thing. This should be the one thing I'd like to get done by the time I left, whether it be in one year, 3, 5....or decades later. “Find the one thing that keeps you grounded and motivated, and you can measure your own progress and success in.” I'd still have to address everything and everyone else, but my one thing would be my guiding light.

It was good advice, and it took me a while to figure out what it should be. Every time I thought I'd figured it out, I'd find a new one thing. At first, I thought it was a more robust incident reporting system. That was a tangible goal and we did that, but after a few months I figured out a single-purpose issue wasn't it. Your one thing shouldn't be something you can name with your boss and put in an annual performance review.

Don't be afraid to dream bigger.

I now give the same advice to my coaching clients in safety leadership roles. Most of them push back at first. Their list of responsibilities is too long, everything seems urgent, and choosing one thing feels like dereliction of the others.

I used to have a Chinese character stickered on my climbing helmet…the journey is the destination. This is one of those things.

What's your one thing? Leave a comment and let me know; I'm genuinely curious. BTW, I wanted people to speak up and see their words change something.

Stu

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P.S. If you would benefit from more structure and a formal accountability buddy to help you figure out and work toward your one thing, let me know. This is prime coaching territory.

If you've read my blog post about 6 lessons all programs can take away from the investigation report, you already know that our old friend and risk management trap played a role: single-person dependency.

It's a trap because it's all too common in our space. Our orgs are small, and work is fast-paced and on tight deadlines, especially during busy seasons. It's too easy for critical tasks to become dependent on a single person, like only one person knows how to drive a specific vehicle, or can speak with a land manager or a partner to resolve an issue, or only one person knows what to do after a fatality.

Dependencies on individuals' skills, abilities, experiences, judgment, and authority exist in every organization I've visited. I've even been that person back in the day, as a program director in Korea.

But it's a trap, and it's easy to fall into. It's an indicator of the overall lower maturity of the entire risk management program.

So, back to Camp Mystic. Single-person dependency isn't named outright in the report. But a keen reader will see it emerge across the facts and circumstances presented.

Here's where I saw it:

• One person knew the emergency and evacuation plan, and that same person was the only one monitoring the weather and precip accumulation that night. When he didn't act in time, nothing else was in place to catch the failure.

• The reliance on this one person was written into the operating and emergency plans. Staff was trained to shelter in place and await further instruction during heavy rain or a flood. Instead, a trigger policy and training on self-rescue would have signaled that everyone should act.

• Campers and their cabin counselors weren't allowed to have phones, so the people closest to the river didn't have a way to receive emergency alerts. They were reliant on one person coming directly to their cabin to tell them to act.

• As a cultural and operational norm, the support staff on the grounds were told to keep their distance and not interact with campers. This means they were less likely to step in to help teenage counselors when needed. And, if they were to step in, they wouldn't know what to do or how to engage the young girls.

Local and state officials share responsibility too. There were no warning sirens along the river. New ones were installed and tested along the Guadalupe this spring.

Redundancies and contingencies are classic risk management tactics. Yet dependencies are common in legacy and smaller programs. Seasonal programs are especially susceptible because a high percentage of staff turnover every year, and the few senior, dedicated staff hold all the institutional knowledge and know-how. We all know this; there's so much to train new staff on that we have to cut the unlikely or little-used drills and information.

But, that's exactly the trap.

What are the critical decisions and tasks under your purview? What redundancies and contingencies are in place if you are not able to do them? What about the people you work closest to?

Spend a few minutes discussing with your colleagues this week. Play the “what if” game…you might be surprised, even relieved, about what you learn.

Stu

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P.S. Here's a link to the Program Risk Scorecard. (AI made that name…I'm all ears for a better one, FYI.) It's a mini maturity assessment of your risk management program.

Send it to your colleagues and compare your results with each other. How 'mature' is your risk management program? Where do you agree, and where are the gaps?

As risk managers, we can readily look at a program and find a million opportunities to add more to the risk management plan.

“Do more in-depth partner vetting,” or “add 6 new student screening questions.” “Train staff on this concept or this other skill…” the list goes on.

But, doing more isn’t necessarily solving the problem. Often, it only serves to relieve a symptom.

The biggest risk I see and hear about is workload capacity; programs and people are already stretched. Workload stress is also the hardest to address.

Financial margins are thin, and staff are constantly being asked to do more with less. There’s never enough time to review, inventory, and build in the off-season as we’d like (and to take much-needed downtime). Adding more to everyone’s plate will likely solve one problem, but it also contributes to another.

Over time, our risk management programs grow and evolve, and each new addition aims to address a specific problem, fear, or a lesson learned. But, when you zoom out and take it all in, and examine the behavior and effectiveness of the entire system, too often we find clutter, confusion, and inefficiencies.

This is called safety clutter.

But, safety clutter doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be refining and adding more. That is, after all, our jobs as risk managers and part of the continuous learning and improvement process.

Try this, instead. Next time you feel the urge to add more, pause first, and ask: “What can I remove?”

Get into the habit of asking staff in all departments these questions:

• What’s the biggest thing the org wants or requires you to do that gets in your way?

• What’s the biggest waste of your time or energy?

• If this [task/procedure/requirement] didn't exist tomorrow, what would actually change about how you do your job?

Don’t get me wrong, these are scary questions to ask. But the feedback is priceless, especially if you get the same answer from many different people.

This week’s takeaway: Next time you feel the urge to add more, pause first, and ask: “What can I remove?”

Stu

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P.S. Workload capacity is a significant driver of migrating work practices and drift, which I wrote about in my first blog post, about systems-thinking.

P.P.S. Safety clutter comes from a 2018 paper by Rae, Provan, Weber, and Dekker: Safety clutter: the accumulation and persistence of 'safety' work that does not contribute to operational safety. Policy and Practice in Health and Safety, 16(2), 194–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/14773996.2018.1491147

The official report was released by the Texas Senate and House general investigating committees a couple of weeks ago. I've been reading and thinking about the lessons Camp Mystic can offer the rest of us. I've written a longer piece about it, posted on my site, called Learning from Camp Mystic: Six Lessons for Outdoor Programs.

I attended summer camp in East Texas as a kid. Like many of us, I have fond memories of summer trips backpacking and exploring the outdoors growing up. No doubt, these experiences were instrumental in shaping my path and a big part of why I do the work I do now.

Reading a hundred-page report on how twenty-seven young campers and counselors died at a Texas summer camp is heavy reading, but also necessary for anyone who plans and manages outdoor and off-campus programs.

In 2024, the Wilderness Climate Lab published a study on climate change and its impact on outdoor programs. More than 90% of the organizations we surveyed had revised their emergency plans for extreme weather in the year prior. 79% had experienced new impacts from storm flooding. If you haven't already, you can join the conversation via our LinkedIn group.

The Camp Mystic flood happened a year after our survey. In many ways, it is the event our respondents are preparing for.

The report is worth reading in full. In fact, I see it as a landmark event in our field, and it should be required reading for any program, risk management, or executive director.

If you don't have time for it, my blog post walks through six lessons relevant to any youth-serving organization or school:

• Plan for the unprecedented

• Pre-determine triggers to act

• Reduce single-person dependencies

• Give every adult a role

• Give staff permission to act

• Practice the plan

I'll come back to a couple of these lessons in future editions of this newsletter.

This week, though, the report itself deserves your attention, as well as a few moments for the families of campers and counselors who call their daughters “Heaven's 27.” The report thoughtfully includes a photo and paragraph about each one.

I'm curious what you think. Leave a comment with the things that stick out to you from this important case study.

Stu

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P.S. The Wilderness Climate Lab will host a pre-conference session at this year's Wilderness Risk Management Conference this fall in Portland, OR. We're excited to facilitate a conversation about wildfires and AQI. We'll see you there!

His talk reminded me of a situation I encountered at a previous job.

I was new and was investigating an illness outbreak at a residential facility that had happened a few months before I started my job. I was trying to engage the program team, but they were hesitant.

I was pulled aside by a senior program leader who explained that four years before I started my new role, they experienced a student fatality. The organization, at the time, didn’t care for its own very well, and the staff felt like the situation was “cleaned up and swept under the rug.”

“Nobody even came to our site to help us, or ask how we were doing, or what could be done for us,” I was told. In the aftermath, it was still business as usual.

Years later and as a result, the staff were distant and skeptical of the organization’s senior leaders, regardless of their involvement in the incident or tenure in the org.

Looking at the literature, I shouldn’t have been surprised. All of this is explainable and, quite normal, actually:

The first victim is the person the incident happened to. The second victims are the people who responded and were involved in the aftermath, from the other group members, the leaders and their support staff, and the senior staff who support after a serious incident (yes…that’s probably you…)

The third victim is the organization itself.

The org suffers when trust erodes and when staff “quietly quit” or leave altogether. The damage and pain linger long after the incident is resolved, and it persists for years. It’s embedded into the organizational culture and in the DNA.

Munge is right. The risk landscape is changing, and more organizations and senior leaders are understanding that caring for your own is caring for and protecting the organization.

A couple of years ago, I was part of a research team that explored second victim syndrome in our field. Here is our paper, called The Silence is Deafening. It’s full of insights and practical tactics you can implement and advocate for.

Take a look at the incidents over the past five years (or longer). Ask the people still involved how often they think about it and whether they have any feedback for the organization on how they’d like to be supported next time.

Stu

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P.S. If you think about an incident or situation from your work or earlier in your career, reach out. Talking with a trusted colleague or peer who has been through something similar is one of the most effective and meaningful strategies practitioners identified in our research.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to me. You can also ask me about strategies your org can implement or resources you can connect with.

I love that it is easier now than ever to find information and content I like and want more of. I hate that it is harder than ever to get out of that loop, and that my attention span and ability to focus feels significantly diminished.

No, that’s not age (for my family members who subscribe to this newsletter).

Like most readers, I feel this despite having spent a career practicing to be present in the outdoors. I can’t imagine being a teenager right now. Their brains are being wired by algorithmic content from the start. Bill Burnett at Stanford calls it "Down Head Syndrome," the modern condition of staring at screens and missing the world happening around you.

Our brains have entire systems designed for wonder and curiosity, and for a lot of people, those systems aren’t getting much exercise.

This part of the changing risk landscape doesn’t change much for OAE programs and operations or risk management (at least not that I want to talk about this week).

I think it changes how we talk about our programs. We’ve always struggled for relevancy and value in the eyes of our clients and society. And, enrollment is a real issue, and leads to numerous downstream safety issues (enrollment is a risk management issue…gotta keep those numbers up).

OAE has long focused on presence, mindfulness, and harnessing the power of awe and natural wonder. That’s our work, and we’re pretty good at it. I still remember a profound moment as a student on a 3-day solo… just from simply watching the ants crawl over the leaves for hours, minding their business of building their colony… just being with them and noticing their world.

I suspect that most parents feel this, too. They see it in their kids, and they feel it in themselves, and they know first-hand how hard it is to harness and hold attention, and recapture (and hold) natural awe and wonder.

Our field can name that pain point and, in turn, offer something real.

Too often, outdoor programs are seen as vitamins. They’re “nice to haves” and are good for enrichment, but they’re not essential to a child’s development or education.

We can help by presenting programs as the prescription. The experiences we offer, sustained attention, presence, real human connection in real places, are not bonus features. They are things that a growing body of research says young people are missing and need.

If your program is still talking about itself like a vitamin, it might be time to rethink how you make the case.

Stu

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P.S. Bill Burnett's new book with Dave Evans is How to Live a Meaningful Life.

The NPS, Forest Service, BLM…all of it. They’ve gutted federal agencies, especially targeting scientists and firefighters, and they want to sell our country’s best assets…it’s heart and soul, to the highest bidder. And they’re blatantly lying about it (I’ll save you my rant…)

But what does this mean for OAE programs?

It means a lot of things, and it certainly makes it harder to have a good partnership with your land manager, if they were able to keep their job.

But, imagine a world without public lands. Where does that leave us? We can look to programs in other parts of the world, where permitting and access work differently and the land management system isn’t nearly as robust as in the U.S.

To run an expedition program in Asia, for example, many programs have to build itineraries that cross multiple jurisdictions across multiple levels of government. You build access town by town and county by county, and then fill in the gaps by property owners. Every piece of a potential route is negotiated, and investment in a relationship and a show of goodwill is required for each potential party. If you lose access to one site or stretch, the whole course can fall apart.

The easier and more practical type of program to run is less remote and shorter, day programs where you just need access to one venue, like a park. There are really good programs in Asia, and there's a lot to learn from them. But the programs are designed the way they are in large part because of access. The wilderness itself, the expanse of it and being in it for a long period of time, is what makes legacy wilderness programming so effective.

That access isn’t guaranteed anymore.

About a year ago, when I was chair of the WRMC, I spoke with Jonathan Jarvis, the former director of the National Park Service. His point was that environmentalism is fractured. Groups are constantly trying to one-up each other to be the purest version of the cause. Now, he said, is not the time for that.

OAE programs don’t typically get involved in politics. We're small, our organizations are fragile, and we exist on the fringes of education, recreation, and environmentalism. The people in our field are values-driven. We vote, we call our representatives, and we use our voices.

But our organizations sit at the intersection of all three of those causes. Our programs are the living proof that education and environmentalism work together for the betterment of society.

Increasingly, we're turning to companies in our field, especially gear companies, to speak up and raise their hand. That seems to be working. But the rest of us have a role too, even if it's just making sure the people in those bigger fights know what's at stake for programs like yours.

Stu

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P.S. The Wilderness Society does incredible work in this space and on our behalf. In particular, check out Paul Sanford’s work.

But, her field staff did it anyway. More than once, they chose to break policy and reduce a dislocation in the field. It was within their scope of training, after all.

She and her leadership team came down hard at first. I can’t blame them. I’m definitely a proponent of having first aid protocols that trump skills covered in a first aid class, and I’m a big fan of following policy…they’re written for a reason.

She described “defensive conversations” with the field leaders. We’ve all seen this movie before: you get called in to explain why whatever you did wasn’t okay. One of her program managers eventually told her, plainly, that the way she’d handled it had made her feel bad.

What she described to me in hindsight was the realization that her staff hadn't been disobeying. They'd been giving her feedback through their behavior. The field staff were closer to the participant, the injury, the evacuation distance, and the actual capability of the team than the protocol was. They were doing their best to manage risk in real time. The leadership team's first response was to blame them, instead of listening to them.

My coachee apologized to her staff. She decided to take these repeated infractions as a signal to review the policy. After seeking input from her medical advisor, she and the risk management committee agreed to change the protocol. Qualified staff can now reduce dislocations in the field.

Legacy risk management in our field focuses on individual instructors’ judgment, decisions, and actions. Under this approach, it’s easy to fall into compliance-based risk management. The switch that’s been underway and will continue as our field matures is towards risk-intelligent learning organizations.

What staff see and do in the field becomes signals and feedback to update practices, policies, and systems. A risk-intelligent, learning organization prioritizes feedback and focuses on improving feedback loops, which in turn improves the context in which staff do their work and exercise their judgment.

What headaches do staff continually create for you? Ask yourself, your advisors, and your staff, what are these headaches telling us about what should change?

Stu

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P.S. If you've got a story like my coachee's, where staff were telling you something through their behavior before you knew how to hear it, leave a comment and tell me about it.

Here's what's now required of licensed youth camps in Texas:

• Written emergency plans covering floods, severe weather, fires, lost campers, intruders, and epidemics, submitted to the state annually

• Evacuation routes posted in every cabin, lit at night, with designated emergency gathering areas

• Weather alert radios in each cabin

• Monitoring of National Weather Service alerts and emergency alert systems that function without internet

• Annual staff safety training and camper safety orientations at the start of each session

• Parents must sign acknowledgments if any portion of the camp is in a floodplain

• Licensing fees increased from $750 to $11,000 for large overnight camps

• Backup internet infrastructure, including fiber, for emergency communications

Most of this is foundational risk management and much of what we already talk about in our field (check out the Wilderness Climate Lab group on LinkedIn). The informed consent piece, which requires parents to sign an acknowledgment that any part of the camp is in a floodplain, is interesting and worth thinking about.

That last one, though, backup and hardwired internet, raises an interesting point.

Legislators know that many camps aren’t able to meet it. A preliminary survey found more than 200 Texas camps don't have access to fiber. That’s potentially a significant reduction in the number of camps that won’t get a license this year, and won’t be able to operate. Remote camps, unfortunately, take the brunt of it.

We don’t yet know the impact, if any, on other remote or wilderness-based programs, even though there are more ways than ever to get and share information to/from the field.

The outdoor programming industry has always preferred to self-regulate, especially in the US. Standards and accreditation exist in large part because of a long-standing concern about government involvement. As a side note, I have a hunch that we’ve also exported that thinking abroad, as we’ve run and built programs internationally and grown accreditation.

Our field is fragile.

I first realized this in Korea after the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. After over 200 students on a field trip died, the government shut down all off-campus programs in the country. Our program was, literally, illegal.

Society has an enormously high expectation for safety and trust in educational programs, including camps and outdoor programs. In that way, we’re similar to the airline industry. When something goes wrong, the public demands governmental action and accountability. Think about what the Boeing failures did to public trust in aviation. Our field occupies that same space.

I still sigh in relief when I board a plane, and it’s an Airbus aircraft.

Society is protective of children, and it should be. Our argument has always been that programs are good for kids. But that value isn't always understood at the governmental level. When something goes wrong, the response is always regulation.

Some of it is thoughtful; some of it is disconnected from how programs actually work and how we know we can manage risk.

Whether you operate in Texas or not, these new laws are worth reading and auditing your own programs against.

Not as a compliance exercise, but as a conversation with your leadership team and board about where your gaps are.

Stuart

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P.S. Both articles are worth reading. Texas Tribune | KXAN

On day two of a nine-day expedition, the lead instructor missed a required check-in. The duty officer on call waited 12 hours, until the next morning, and then notified the Coast Guard. When asked where he expected the group to be, he opened the group’s emergency response plan to the projected itinerary section.

It was blank. He had to tell the Coast Guard that he didn’t know.

After pinging a few cell towers, the Coast Guard found a signal from what they thought could belong to the unaccounted-for group. The duty officer called the number and the assistant instructor picked up.

All was good, nobody was injured, and nothing was wrong. They just missed the check-in.

When I pressed on this incident, I quickly figured out that the organization’s takeaway was that the lead instructor had messed up. That person failed to follow protocol and missed sending a text via Garmin InReach device. Worse yet, that person failed to completely fill out the necessary paperwork and emergency response plan before the trip. But it was the instructor’s first year on the job. The previous person was in that job for over 20 years.

The program had norms and expectations of each other that were unspoken and established over years of working together. When that person left, those routines left, too.

There’s a lesson in this story for the rest of us. COVID sucked, and we learned a lot from it. COVID kicked off a wave of cascading crises in our field. Staff turnover is perhaps the most notable issue that has taken years to recover from (it’s debatable if we’ve fully recovered today).

If a key staff member in your program left tomorrow, what would walk out the door with them? How do you know that newer staff truly know all the requirements, routines, and norms that are expected of them?

It’s not enough to just write them down (you already know this). And, you don’t have time to train and test them on every aspect of the job.

Instead, look for opportunities to integrate the small things into regular touch points, such as staff meetings, announcements, email communications, and hallway conversations, where the way we do things here can be discussed constantly.

Even better, compile a list of things “I wish I had known earlier” from new and veteran staff alike, and scaffold those details across many connection points.

If your org relies solely on people knowing the written protocols (rather than backing them up through consistent knowledge dissemination), you’re depending on the next person to figure out their job on their own. If this is the case, you might not find out what’s missing until something goes wrong.

Stu

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I love this idea.

It embodies the intuition that is cultivated from years of traveling through the mountains, and it applies equally to all outdoor pros. The outdoor industry has been trying to explain it and figure out how to develop it for a long time. I think, perhaps, we're getting closer with newer frameworks for non-technical skills (like situational awareness, judgment, and cognitive readiness).

But, I have to admit, I’m secretly hopeful we never fully figure it out. I think there is something special and timeless about human intuition and nature.

Mountain sense is built on a set of assumptions about the weather and terrain you are "raised" in and work in. When that environment changes, intuition isn't as reliable a decision-making criterion as mythology would have.

Last winter’s avalanche tragedy in Tahoe is perhaps an example and a cautionary tale of the future for our field.

In the Sierra Nevada, the snowpack is traditionally characterized as maritime, meaning wet, heavy, and a deep snowpack. Increasingly, though, it’s been trending closer to its polar opposite, a continental snowpack characterized as drier and shallower.

The difference isn’t just in ski conditions, it’s in the typical avalanche problems recreationalists and professionals alike train for and the hazards for which they develop their intuition and judgment.

For about 4 years I was lucky to work two winters a calendar year; one in Tahoe and one in the Andes. They had very different snowpacks, and, for me, it definitely required some dialing in to change my thinking patterns and check my biases. Avalanche work is good like that :D

What does all of this mean for us now?

These are slow changes, and they’re not obvious, especially when you are in them. Zooming out, I think it means this:

It’s harder for the next generation to develop their own mountain sense. Perhaps more accurately, we shouldn’t model their reading of the mountains after our own. They need a broader sample size, and more clear signals…perhaps more decision making rules and structures.

And for us, the people now behind a desk, we should be cognizant that we might be drawing from our own intuition of nature, weather, and climate. When a staff member calls from the field, and you’re weighing their decisions and judgment, you’re putting yourself in their shoes with our own lens you developed from ‘back in the day’.

Judgment and mountain sense still matter...they will always be the cornerstone of good safety management in our field. But as climates continue to change, we're recognizing that more thoughtful structures are needed to support the development and exercise of that judgment.

Stu

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P.S. The NPR piece on the Tahoe avalanche and climate is worth a read.