Get Outdoors - Women: Making Good Decisions Outdoors

There are many things to enjoy about the outdoors, whether you are in the lead or with others who are more experienced: camaraderie; dramatic and scenic situations; physical and athletic challenges; the joy of movement; nearness to nature and the elements; spiritual renewal and peace. One of the things I like best about outdoor activities is that the experience can be so similar whether you are a beginner or a veteran. Everyone faces the same essential challenge, which arises from the comparison between what you know you can do, and what you believe you can do but aren't quite sure. The experience of meeting that challenge is what keeps us engaged: what we learn from it, the persistence and faith in ourselves it requires, the feelings of disappointment, achievement, and frustration that result.

Making good decisions is a critical element in meeting the challenge, and is also much the same at all levels. The ability to make good decisions is arguably the most important skill in mountaineering and in many other outdoor activities. In the outdoors, decisions can have truly important consequences, and thus also present the greatest opportunities for learning - not only about the environment, but also about us.

In my own personal experience as a woman starting out in mountaineering, I found at first I had too few opportunities to be in a decision-making role. In fact, at first I shunned the opportunities I did have. I didn't feel ready. I would guess I was not unique in this. But I have to say that once I did take on the responsibility for making decisions, I began to love it, and to understand the passion many of my friends felt about the mountains.

Learning to make good decisions:

The goal of most of our decision-making outdoors is risk management. That is, to reach our objective while managing risks to a level we personally find acceptable. A by-product of the process is learning, which in turn leads us to make better decisions. Staying alive depends on us not making too many mistakes or the wrong kinds of mistakes. But learning happens both when the results are "successful" i.e. what we expected, and maybe even more so when we get surprised. We can maximize our learning by seeing it as a goal in and of itself: by focusing on and critiquing our decision-making processes.

Suggestions for Improving Decision-Making Skills:

Making decisions is a major life skill we have all obviously developed in reaching "adulthood" (o.k. maybe a dubious term when applied to climbers). In some realm or other of life, we are all already experts in decision-making. But I think it helps us gain skill and confidence making decisions in a realm that is new to us if we focus on several concrete things that will make our decision-making successful and that help us learn from our experiences.

Awareness and observation:

You should actively try to become more aware and observant. A good exercise is to compare what you thought a given experience would be like, to what it actually turned out to be like. Looks are often deceiving. Things turn out to be steeper or less steep, harder or less hard than they appear. Weather often turns out to be different than anticipated. Think about any differences you encounter between your expectations and reality, and draw conclusions for the future. This exercise will help you correct any systematic errors in your perceptions, as well as improving your observation skills and memory of terrain features.

Knowledge:

Build your knowledge. This can be done by reading, by taking courses and receiving training in various topics: snow stability and avalanche courses, orienteering, mountain weather, climbing skills, etc.

Experience:

Every time you go out, you will gain deeper and more reliable knowledge from your experience. You can optimize the value of your experiences by doing a self-critique at the end of each day. One good way to structure this is to ask yourself the following questions:

1) Where and when were I, my partner, or others in my party at the greatest risk today?

You may feel that you were never at unacceptable risk, but risk is like background noise, ever present, in the mountains. When was the noise the loudest? This inquiry sharpens your awareness of hazards, which is the all-important first step in managing them. It may help to do this exercise with your partner(s), as you may have missed something or they might have a different perspective on it.

2) What did I do about this risk? Was my response adequate? What else could I have done that would have reduced that risk further? What costs would that alternative response have entailed? Would it have been worth it, in retrospect?

This is a form of cost/benefit analysis, which is central to decision making in every realm of experience. Our safety measures often have a cost, usually in time or complexity, sometimes in exposure to other risks. Often the cost can entail as great or greater risk than the hazard we are striving to reduce. We always have to weigh the costs in any risk management strategy, and determine when we've got a good balance, and things are "safe enough".

For example, in the mountains, moving fast unquestionably reduces some risks, such as rockfall, weather, avalanche, nightfall, excess fatigue etc. However, other risks are increased if we cut corners to save time, such as the risk of one or other of the party falling while un-roped or un-belayed. Your decision of when or how to rope up, when and where a belay is warranted, may be difficult to make on easy but exposed mountain terrain.

In climbing, you should be addressing these questions: How likely am I or my partner(s) to fall here? What would be the consequences of a fall here? How confident am I in my ability to answer these questions? Your confidence level will determine what you decide to do about the risk you perceive. If your confidence in your assessments is low, you will probably want to be more conservative, and build in a larger margin for error in your strategy for managing the risk.

Finally, in your process of looking back over your day, you should assess yourself as well as your actions:

3) Do I have the knowledge and tools to adequately manage the risk I encountered today, or do I need more training?

Just because you can't think of a better way to deal with a situation you encountered than the way you chose, doesn't mean a better way doesn't exist. If you can't think of anything you could have done better, but still feel uncomfortable about the risks you ran or the extent to which you had to "trust to luck", then either you were in an unfortunate situation where retreat was the only prudent option, or you need to enlarge your bag of options. Instruction and training, or more time with more experienced teachers, are the best ways to do this.

When you are with others who are more experienced, your opportunities for decision-making are more limited, but you can still take advantage of these situations for learning. Try out your own thought processes and decisions with them, asking for their input, comparing their impressions and assessments with your own. Realize also, however, that they might not be very good at articulating their own reasoning processes and observations, or might not have time, so be mindful of their situation.

Things that get in the way

There are a number of common obstacles to good decision-making. The more aware we are of these, the better we can reduce or correct for them. I would summarize the most important of these obstacles as ego, emotions, and insufficient information.

Ego: we women are clearly NOT immune from the distortions of ego engagement. The biggest problem ego poses for us is in tempting us to lie to ourselves about our limitations. Much of the challenge and interest in climbing has to do with pushing our comfort level and overcoming limitations, but we can't do that without first assessing them honestly. The problem is always to sort out what are real limitations and what are imagined or self-imposed ones. This can be pretty hard! The essential thing is, no one else can draw this line for us, and each of us has to draw it, and re-examine and re-draw it, for ourselves, continually.

Emotions: there are similar problems with strong emotions such as fear or desire. Fear is obviously an emotion evolved to help keep us alive! But it's also obvious how debilitating and distorting it can be when we let it guide our behavior. On the other extreme is desire, which can overrule common sense and even fear if it's strong enough. The trick is to remember that while emotions are inevitable and naturally loom large in our experience, if we allow them to be a part of our decision-making, they will lead to poor results. Emotions are a bad ingredient in risk management decisions, even in small doses.

Feelings can be a useful tool in processing our experiences after the fact, however. For example, when we have backed off of something that we inwardly believe we could probably have done at reasonable risk, we have an uneasy feeling. When we've backed off of something in the face of real difficulties that are beyond our current abilities, or real risks that are beyond our personal tolerance, we feel serene. Likewise, when we persist in something we ourselves feel to be unacceptably risky and "get away with it" out of sheer luck, we feel uneasy, whereas if we succeed at something through our skill and courage, while maintaining a (for us) acceptable level of risk, we feel satisfied with ourselves. By reflecting on these reactions and feelings, we can learn something about ourselves, and about our motivations and rewards in the sport.

Insufficient information: The outdoors is such a complex environment, and we are so limited in our ability to know and understand all of what's going on in any particular moment, that it is truly impossible for us to have full information about everything that might effect our safety and chances of success at every moment. There is an element of uncertainty in all our decisions, this is a fact of life and we must accept it. We want to gather as much information as possible, enough to make a wise decision about what to do. The better observers we become, the better the information available to us. But we can only second-guess ourselves so much and still be realistic and fair. When we look back at the situation and critique our decisions, we should distinguish between that which we could reasonably have known at the time and should have responded to differently and therefore was a "mistake", and that which we did not and could not know, and therefore is just an "experience" to learn from in order to avoid future mistakes.

(As an aside, we have even less knowledge or understanding when evaluating someone else's experience when we were not there. What we can learn from stories about other people is very limited, even - or maybe especially - when processed for us by "experts" such as in Accidents in North American Mountaineering, or books such as Into Thin Air).

The point here is that it's important to learn what information is relevant to making good decisions and try hard to gather it. But we cannot totally eliminate risk, guess work and occasional errors, and still attain goals that are important to us, so we shouldn't fool ourselves that activities like climbing are "safe", nor can we expect to get it right all the time.

In the final analysis, you are always in charge of your own safety and your own decisions. Even your decision that you can trust your guide or buddy more than yourself, and your decision to put your safety in their hands, is made on some basis - and is hopefully well justified! Make all your decisions consciously, and you will feel a lot better about them. The rewards of making your own decisions are that it gets easier with practice, it makes us better at the things we love, and it is a large part of what makes outdoor activities so fascinating and useful to us as human beings.