S01:E18 Lucky or Good? Understanding Risk and the Science of Safety with Steve Smith

What if safety was not just about preventing things from going wrong, but learning more deeply from why things usually go right?

In this episode of The Outdoor Education Podcast, Rob is joined by Steve Smith, founder of Experiential Consulting and author of Safety Science for Outdoor and Experiential Education. Together, they explore how outdoor educators, schools and programme leaders can think more clearly about risk, safety, judgement and purposeful challenge.

Steve shares how his experiences in outdoor risk management shaped his thinking around beneficial risk, organisational culture and learning in dynamic environments.

The conversation moves through risk literacy, the limits of being “paper safe”, the difference between work as imagined and work as done, and the importance of learning from near misses, workarounds and everyday success.

This episode is full of thoughtful, practical insight for outdoor educators, school leaders and anyone interested in building a more honest, human and learning-centred approach to safety and risk.

Find out more about Steve and Experiential Consulting:
https://outdoorrisk.com

Steve’s book, Safety Science for Outdoor and Experiential Education, is available here: https://a.co/d/05226cTB

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome to the Outdoor Education Podcast. Honest conversations about nature, learning, and leadership. We explore stories from the field that remind us why outdoor and experiential education matters now more than ever. Steve has spent more than three decades working across outdoor education, including leadership roles with organizations such as Outward Bound and the Student Conservation Association. He has also shaped the wider sector conversations through his writing, including his latest book, Safety Science for Outdoor and Experiential Education, which has challenged many of us to think more carefully about safety and risk culture. Steve, it's great to have you here and welcome to the Outdoor Education Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Thanks so much, Rod. It's great to be here with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Steve, we always start these conversations by asking people a little bit about your early years and what first drew you to the outdoors and indeed outdoor education in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Yeah, thanks. Great question. I would say that those are two separate things. My childhood and outdoor education were actually very far apart. However, I did grow up uh around boats and driving small power boats around the Chesapeake Bay, which is on the east coast of the United States, uh, navigating myself around at an improbab, probably an inappropriately young age by today's parenting standards. And it was just normal in that era to let your kids roam free. And I think parenting has kind of changed, you know, during during my lifetime. But, you know, learning to navigate my way around in this small boat out of the middle of the Chesapeake Bay and problem solving and getting lost and dealing with the broken engine and making my way, my way back again to where I was supposed to be before dark, I think did set the stage for the focus that my life would take on risk management and the benefits of navigating your way through these wild experiences. So that was an interesting aspect to my childhood in growing up in Virginia. But I actually didn't get into what we think of as formal outdoor education until I was a freshman in college, if you can believe that. And later, between college and grad school, I took a Knowles course, the National Outdoor Leadership School, that really honestly changed the trajectory of my life because I was planning to be an English teacher. And in fact, I became an English teacher. And I was teaching English at a university and I did that on and off over about an eight-year period. But I improbably quit my English teaching job to go live in the back of my truck and be a dirtbag outdoor educator. And um, you know, working at a series of smaller programs until I found my way to outward bound. And I ended up, you know, outward bound ended up here in the United States, ended up being a huge part of my life for several decades. And it's where I learned a lot of the lessons that would go into my later work in risk management. So there's in a nutshell, um, you know, from navigating little boats around in the Chesapeake Bay to then ending up as a mountaineering instructor at Outward Bound. Uh, I think there's a little bit of a connection there.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

It's amazing. Uh it's great to hear just that insight into your own personal journey. If we if we think then, you know, focusing more on the professional work that you've done, you've spent time working obviously in the field roles as a mountaineering instructor, you've had leadership positions, and now you venturing into that kind of consultancy and leading those sector-wide conversations with the authoring of a couple of books that you've put out there in the world. If you think back, what experiences shaped your thinking today, especially around that approach to experiential education and risk management?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Interesting. Great question. Really interesting one to kind of reflect on because, you know, I have been in that frontline instructor, outdoor educator role, you know, working with the policies that I was provided, working with the equipment that I was handed, working with the organizational culture, you know, that that was a part of the organization that I was in. But then I've also worked in uh administrative roles, including HR, human resources. And uh I interviewed and hired hundreds of people uh and then trained them to come work at Hourbound when I was their staffing manager in a national capacity. So I kind of have seen outdoor education from that lens and from that angle as well. And then ultimately moving more into safety management leadership and then consulting. So I've kind of seen safety management and outdoor education coming from a lot of these different angles. And I think that it really influences how I look at things now because I can really put myself in the shoes of the frontline staff. And I think that that's what can often get lost when we try to implement safety strategies from the top down, or uh, you know, a new philosophical approach comes from the top down, or even policies and procedures that come from the top down, can often lose sight of how are those policies and procedures or strategies or new equipment or new requirements or new population that you're going to be working with, whatever the change is, you know, how does that ripple all the way down to the front lines? And are we involving those front lines, folks, as part of our safety management strategies and systems, like we should be, because safety can't or shouldn't just come from the top down. It also needs to come from the front lines up. And I think that that is a big theme uh in my latest book, for example, is trying to work through that kind of dynamic between does safety come from the top down and is that the right place? Or can we look at our frontline workers themselves as um not the cause of our safety problems, but the solutions to our safety problems, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

I think you you mentioned something there that struck me and and a little light bulb went off is that idea of your HR rule and the in the concept of middle leadership. And we talk about things being influenced from top down and we talk about, you know, from the ground up, but that idea of leading from the middle is I think a super interesting concept to explore because you actually see what it looks like from both perspectives, and no more so than from a HR rule when you're actually your job is dealing with the people. So you're getting the information from the top down that they want relate to the bottom, and also from the bottom that they want taken care of with issues that they may be having at the top as well. Where do you see the perspective of the people in those middle leadership roles coming in to have an impact on programming and again, maybe programming in general, but also from a risk management perspective as well?

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Yeah, well, having been that's a wonderful question. Having been formally trained in human resources, I can um pull back the curtain and say that there are really two very different schools of thought that exist in the human resources world. And in one, I would almost call it a corporate or a prevailing way of thinking about human resources, that the HR function is protecting the organization from the workers, from the people themselves. And that is the purpose of HR. And I prefer, in in that regard, like the metaphor might be like HR is kind of serving as parking brakes, you know, for the for the whole organization. And I prefer to work in an HR capacity or to help people adopt an HR function that is more like headlights than parking brakes. And it's looking forward to anticipate what do people need to succeed? How can we support them being their best selves? How can we help people work through challenges that they're having so that they can either stay here and continue to be a part of this organization or gracefully step down if that's not the right place for them to be? So there's a there's a function where HR sees people as the problem and they're protecting the organization from the people. And then there's a function where HR sees humans as resources and is uh and is actually um trying to help them be the best versions of themselves. And obviously, you know, as outdoor educators and doing what we do, that's obviously more philosophically um in alignment with how most of us tend to see the world. So uh I think that the HR department is an incredibly important part of the organization of the safety management system for an organization if it is seeing people as as resources instead of seeing them as the problems that they need to protect the organization from, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Yeah, absolutely. And I I think you you touched you touch on some uh really great points there. Uh Steve, I'd like to just uh refocus a little bit more on you as a person and the influences that shape you. You're obviously based in the Pacific Northwest. It seems a place that you're deeply rooted in in terms of your connection with that landscape, the coast, obviously, your sea kayaking, the mountains and hiking and spending time in those. How do you feel that that has influenced you and the way your approaches to outdoor education and risk management have been formed?

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yeah, wonderful question. And you're right. I am deeply rooted here. I first came here in the early 90s, and I was just blown away by this place and the idea of these big glaciated mountains and steep, dynamic, you know, North Cascades and volcanoes and the Puget Sound and the ecosystem, and just this incredibly dynamic place with the weather and the steepness and all the things. And and so that word dynamic is really an important part of it because it puts a lot of emphasis. If you're operating and you're running outdoor education programs or just trying to live uh and recreate in a place like this, it puts a lot of emphasis on your judgment, on your adaptability, on being able to change the plan to fit the circumstances that you find yourself in. The plan you originally made rarely is the right one in such a dynamic place. And so interestingly, that is what my evolving approach to risk management would ultimately uplift is this idea that we don't want educators blindly following rules, rigidly following an itinerary. You know, now we're gonna climb on day four because that's what the schedule says. You need to be constantly evaluating, reassessing, um, being adaptable. And that comes back to that idea that the workers themselves, these frontline folks, are the solutions to our safety problems, not the cause of them. Um, so just that that this this dynamic place, the Pacific Northwest, with these, you know, eight-foot tidal exchanges that we have, um, and just the incredibly dynamic conditions and the weather and everything leads us to have to be risk aware and focused on your outcome and your mission, not not the what you're doing, but more the why you're doing it. And uh I think that is what occurs to me in terms of how the Pacific Northwest has kind of shaped my my worldview around what a good outdoor education looks like and what good risk management looks like. So I love that question. No one has ever asked me that before. And I I had to just come up with something, but that's what I would say.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

That's super and tapping into those influences, and we referenced your your latest book uh in the introduction, but your your first book that you released, Beneficial Risks, was more of a collection uh where you acted as the editor of theories, research, and lessons learned through experiences where you were collating a lot of ideas from other people as opposed to being more self-driven, like your your latest book is just thinking again on influences. Who are some of the primary influences that have guided the development of your philosophy and your uh approach that maybe are referenced within within your first book, Beneficial Risks?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm proud of the team that came together to offer their incredible insights and wisdom. And you're right that I was sort of aggregating and synthesizing and trying to make a coherent story out of the remarkable um experiences and stories and voices of these folks who are meant to have been heroes and mentors to be in this outdoor risk management space. People like attorney Reb Gregg, who has played such a huge uh foundational role in the sort of philosophical approach to seeing risk as not a bad thing. And uh he has a uh a concept that the law says yes to risk. You know, that's contrary to a lot of the sort of litigious, risk-averse kind of lenses that some attorneys might bring, but Reb was um kind of way beyond his, way ahead of his time uh in helping a lot of us kind of wrap our heads around the value of risk. You know, other contributors to the book are um uh people like Lewis Glenn, who was the uh a leader in safety at Outward Bound for a long time, including in an era where, you know, the school was really learning how to uh when something tragic occurred, to look at um the concept that we're not gonna blame an individual for this, we're gonna look at the systems that set that person up to succeed or fail and try to improve the workplace and not just focus on the worker. So um people like Lewis, um, people like Deb Ayango, uh, who would make a great guest for your podcast sometime. She went through a tragic uh event as the leader of an outdoor program up in Alaska where there was a fatality, and she has written uh multiple books about the lessons learned. That's the name of her book, Lessons Learned, um, from these experiences, and has just been a real um colleague and friend and mentor to me in a lot of ways. And um, one of your guests from a few episodes ago, Claire Dallet, is a wonderful uh colleague and friend in this space, and uh she contributed some stuff to the book as well. There, the book is full of remarkable people like that. I I could I could keep naming them all. Um, and by not naming someone, it's not because they weren't a very important part of the story. But yeah, there was just a lot of really I felt like I was standing on the shoulders of giants in pulling together the ideas and concepts, and it was my job to kind of weave it into more of a coherent sequence of chapters.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

If I consider the title of your first book, Beneficial Risk, it it's something that's a really interesting concept. We see so much of modern approaches to eliminating risk. And previous guests on the show have talked about, and I'm sure is your philosophy, it's it's an impossible task, right? So if we cannot eliminate it, what can we do to benefit from it? Can you maybe frame some of your thinking around that for our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Yeah, wonderful. Thank you for that. Well, Rich Louvre, Richard Louvre, wrote a wonderful book, Last Child in the Woods, uh, that beautifully describes not only the extent to which we can eliminate risk, but the extent to which it's a harmful thing to try. And that it is not helpful for kids to be completely deprived of that childhood that I had piloting that boat in the Chesapeake Bay and learning from the mistakes and being caught out in storms and having engine failure and having to solve my own problems and learning through the actual uh real life experiential engage encounters with real life and with risk. And uh whether you cut your your child loose in the Chesapeake Bay, you know, today might not be looked at the same way as it was then, but you my point being to completely shield, overprotect kids from any opportunity to encounter uh risk does not help them learn how to become risk managers in the rest of their life. Richard Liu's book has a chapter called The Bike Ride to Nowhere, which was just this concept that back in the day when we were kids, kids would have breakfast and get on the bike and disappear and not be back till dinner. And there were no cell phones, and the parents had no idea where they were. And we all turned out for the most part pretty well, you know, and the idea that overprotecting kids is not a good thing. So we are not a very risk literate species, and certainly like mainstream Western society, teaches us a lot of the wrong lessons about risk. We we misuse terms, we you know, you can't get on a plane and not hear the words, your safety is our top priority. And we we talk always talk about safety being a top priority. You hear people talk about, well, we need to make this playground as safe as possible. Is that so? Is that actually a good idea? Or uh do we need it to be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible, right? You know, this whole movement of active play, which was initially called risky play, and they decided to rebrand it. But this idea that kids benefit from being able to, you know, build structures that might fall down and learn to, you know, take appropriate risks. This can be everything I'm saying right now, could be easily misinterpreted. You could hear someone saying that we should just have no boundaries whatsoever and there should be no structure and no supervision and just let kids wildly encounter risk. And that's not at all what I'm saying. I am saying that over-protecting kids and trying to completely eliminate risk is not only impossible, but it's not even good for them. And that there are benefits that that we can gain, and they're obvious if you think about it. What are the beneficial risks of the programs that you run with your participants, you know, your students? I'm gonna guess, you know, being out of your comfort zone, um, taking on new leadership roles, um, being vulnerable and asking for help, uh, if that's not something that you're used to doing or something that's rewarded in your the rest of your life. Um, being receptive when someone asks for help and being able to step into that role. You know, there's social risks, there's physical risks, there's um even artistic risks that folks can take on these programs. There's lots of different types of risks that are beneficial ones that we need to design the programs to amplify and not pretend, not use risk as this code word for something that's bad. What do we have to lose? How about if we frame risk as something that we have to gain as well, and then have an honest conversation?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

And you make so many great points in that, Steve. And one of the things that I'm drawn to is the idea of the importance of language. I think as a as a whole, as a as a field, framing risk around risk intelligence and risk literacy is another way to maybe engage some of those parents that are more risk-averse, framing it that, you know, your child is going to walk out the door, go to university when they're 18 and they're gonna be living by themselves, or you know, they're going into the big wide world and they have to look after themselves. We want to give them the tools, we want to teach them in the same way we would teach them math to look after their finance or English so they know how to write an email. We want to make sure that they are equipped with the skills to lead a successful life. And if we don't expose them to those ideas of uh risk management and sensible risk mitigation strategies, what what greater risk are we posing to those kids in that moment?

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Yeah, I love it. And you know, I've started thinking not just about risk management, because even that phrase of risk management is predicated on the the notion, you know, that risk is something that we should just be tolerating, managing, you know, mitigating to an acceptable level. It's an inherently bad thing that we need to manage. And I've started uh building on the concept of beneficial risks. And around here somewhere I have a hat that it's it's uh it's my company logo, and it's Says optimizing risk instead of managing it. And it's the idea, of course, that you know, without risk, there can be no rewards. And without, you know, we couldn't eliminate the risk if we wanted to. And as we just discussed, it's actually not even a good idea. So, how about instead of managing risk, if we're optimizing it and we are intentionally designing the programs to achieve our mission and our outcomes and those specific examples of, you know, the goals you have for those participants? On the other hand, what risk, what sprained ankle, what lost participant, what injury is worth incurring if it wasn't done in pursuit of the mission and those outcomes and the intentionality you have. So this is this is about being very intentional and having a more honest conversation, you know, with your team and with your participants and with their parents and everyone else about the specific reasons why the risks of the program are worth taking, worth uh accepting and pursuing, you know, for in those beneficial ways. So, you know, in our society, we tend to think of we you you brought up language and like the specific ways that language can kind of trick us. And that idea of like the risk-averse parent, I might even like gently push back on that because in order for them to be risk averse, they need to have an accurate assessment of risk and some risk literacy of their own to begin with. And I've seen parents very nervously driving their kids to a climbing gym because they're nervous about the climbing gym, but they're texting on their phone while they're driving them there. Right. And so they're they're they're worried about the wrong risks, in other words.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

You bring up a great point, and it's something that actually Claire Dallett and I talked about. And it it it would be fantastic to get both of you on the call at the same time uh for a good conversation, because one of the things that we explored is that idea of the arbiters of risk. Who are we to say that this is a non-risk activity or a low-risk activity, and the the parents' ideas that they're coming into it with are correct or incorrect. And we had a good conversation around that where we both agreed and conceded on on different points. And and I I do think that that idea of developing risk intelligence cannot be solely held by the professionals. I think it is part of our responsibility as people who are operating in that space to be able to try and develop the understanding uh of risks, you know, what is an appropriate risk. One of the examples that I use quite frequently is driving here in Thailand is one of the riskiest activities that we do. There's somewhere between 16 and 20,000 road deaths every year here in in Thailand. That's huge numbers. But that is a a risk that everybody is willing to take. But then to say, okay, we're going to go swimming or we're going to go kayaking or sailing, and it's a it's an active choice that is beyond the standard daily routine and program of someone else that you're asking them to put in a considered effort to go and do this activity, then obviously the the mindset and the framework shifts. So, what is our responsibility as facilitators, programmers in in this field to help educate not just the participants but the the guardians and the parents?

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Yeah, beautiful. Great, great question. You know, as I recall, the discussion you and Claire were having had to do with the the commonly used and misused terms of um perceived risk and actual risk. And uh I take the I take that whole like concept to task a little bit in my first book, um, not only for the reasons that you're discussing about who gets to decide, who gets to be the arbiter of what is real and perceived. So there's that aspect, but there's also more this coming back to this question of risk literacy. Are we really teaching risk literacy? Are we really teach teaching people to usefully become risk managers in their own lives when we're tricking them? You know, we've got them clipped into 19 different carabiners and they're they're scared because they're 50 feet off the ground, but we're using this perceived risk and the actual risk is kind of a cheat trick, you know. And um, I don't think it actually contributes to the um I think it might make the outdoor educator's job easier, but it doesn't actually contribute to any specific outcomes that I can think of that are valuable for the participant. So um anyway, that's really interesting. And coming back to the larger responsibility we have, you know, the in the first book in the beneficial risk book, um, we actually start with a chapter called The Value of Risk, and then we go to mission. What is the relationship between mission and risk management? In other words, how does should your risk management strategies arise from the specific purpose of your program to begin with? How can we create those together, as opposed to bolting on the policies at the end or seeing it as something we do, you know, right before the kids arrive, right? It's it needs to be arising from the purpose of the program. And then there is a section on risk to risk philosophy or risk tolerance, some people would call it, and being very explicit and specific and not using platitudes like safety is our top priority, or we guarantee the safety of your of you know your son, and we hire the best educators. And so we can get conf organizations can get confused about that and and slip into a marketing language, you know, trying to convince parents that this is going to be okay instead of being honest with them about what are the risks that are inherent in this activity, what are the beneficial ones that we actually want to pursue? You know, is our approach to risk management avoidance or pursuit? Are we trying to avoid injuries? We're trying to run away from human error, are we trying to go away from something? If all we're trying to do is go away from something, it doesn't matter much what direction we go, right? We we're just go we're going away from it. And and instead, I would suggest that we should be much more finite and specific and accurate in thinking about what is it that we're going towards and make your risk management strategy about pursuit rather than about avoidance. And so this is my somewhat long-winded way of trying to answer your wonderful question about, you know, it when we are clear, uh, and you can have parents as part of those conversations, but when we are clear about the relationship between your mission and your outcomes and your risk tolerance, you know, as a school or as a program, um, then I think it makes those conversations much more adult-to-adult conversations instead of cheap tricks or marketing or parental style conversations where you know you're talking down to someone or managing their fears, you know, shifting into more of a peer-to-peer conversation instead of a vertical um parental style conversation, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

And that's a fantastic answer. I really appreciate that, particularly given the systems approach to it, right? It's not just one way. It it it it's it's multifaceted. And when I think about that, are there any examples then where the effort to remove uncertainty would actually weaken the learning or make things less safe?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yeah, that's that is now you're starting to get a little bit more into the second book. And um, this question of how, you know, honestly, the way that a lot of risk management systems work is this illusion of certainty, this illusion of safety. We've checked all the boxes, we've filled out the forms, uh, we have inspected the equipment, and we've logged in the book that we've inspected the equipment. We are very safe on paper. We're safe on this construct, this idea, this belief that we can anticipate what all of the possible hazards and combinations of problems might be, and that we have put the right policies and procedures and equipment and personnel and training in place, barriers between us and this known finite hazard that we absolutely understand and have identified and wrapped our arms around it. There's this belief, this illusion of certainty that if we have filled out all those forms, we we can be safe, or what some people have called paper safe, kind of poking at it a little bit, safe on paper. But you know, we are not smart enough as a species to actually anticipate all of the possible hazards and combinations of things that could go wrong. And in fact, when we pursue this illusion of safety, I would argue that filling out those forms, like here you are, here you are, it's a it's a it's a Friday, and you're expected to fill out this risk assessment uh for a trip that's leaving on Monday. You have a lot of incentive to fill that out and to use it as a way of justifying a decision that you've already made as a school, that the trip is leaving on Monday morning. And it it can it can make us less safe in that you are spending your time demonstrating this illusion of certainty instead of doing things that might actually make a difference for the safety of that program, like checking the first aid kit or checking the tires on the vehicle or whatever the steps might be, you know. So so I would it's I'm not saying that risk assessments or any of these processes are inherently bad, but I'm saying that they can create an illusion of certainty that actually puts us in the wrong mindset. We should be thinking about when, not if, right? And so that the the second book, Safety Science book, explores that a lot more than the first book does.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Thanks to your sponsors at Cast Connected. CAS, our creativity, activity, and service, forms a key part of many international school programs around the world. The team at Cast Connected helps educators move beyond the logs with workshops, practical resources, and one-to-one coaching sessions that support meaningful CAS and community engagement in schools. For anyone trying to get to grips with CAS or wanting to make it feel more purposeful and alive, visit CastConnected.com. What I'm drawn to, particularly within this region, and having had several organizations reach out for advice or help to myself personally on approaches to risk management, approaches to how they build that in. What you get is a lot of organizations looking to get a good starting point. We need to be very careful in the language that we use around that. A lot of it will depend on organizational maturity, a lot of it will depend on what their starting point is, and having these core foundations of the paperwork to get someone started. For me, what I think the language needs to be around is your risk assessments, your mitigation strategies, your procedures, and your approaches, that's your starting point. What's more important is that it's layered on top of that, that you've got the professionals who can step in to be more dynamic in how it progresses as well. Having one without the other is difficult. Another thing that I've seen is, you know, and again, this paper-safe idea, 200-page manual on every single thing. And what we we know what happens there is no one reads it. So, and again, from a school perspective, uh, the trip's not going ahead unless there is some of the paperwork that like that needs to be done too. So I uh I appreciate that, but just trying to create some like uh discourse around it, I do I do think that it shouldn't be one versus the other, but maybe a more layered approach so that we can appreciate both things 100%.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

And yeah, I really appreciate your sort of reframing that. Um there is an approach to safety, a sort of top-down traditional rule-based approach, which we which uh researchers have called safety one. And there is sort of a um coming from the bottom-up approach uh that focuses on people rather than rules, and that's what people have called safety two. And the thing is, you can't you you need both. You can't just do one. A lot of places just do safety one. I'll say that, but I'll say we can't do safety two without safety one, both are important, and we need safety three. Yeah, maybe, yeah, we'll work on that, we'll do that on the next podcast, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

Yeah, no, but I do and it it comes back to actually what we talked about from the beginning and that leading from the middle, trying to find that middle ground where both things fit. One of the things that I'm drawing back to is the idea of procedures and and something that can sometimes get lost in the field with the desire to deliver the activity, right? Having those really set procedures or guidelines. I a great example is a few months ago we had an expedition going out from here, and it was a four-day expedition, and on the second day, the wind, it was a kayaking expedition, the wind got quite strong, and there was a channel, channel was only a kilometer across, and their ACA trained instructors, and the wind had got to I think it was 15 knots. Now, the procedures that we have in place, and that was in part brought by the ACA guidelines, is that we don't go out beyond 10 knots of wind, but the channel was only a kilometer across, and then they were going to be into uh you know an estuary and up through it. And there was the the question was asked on the phone to me, do you think we can just get across the channel? And it's like, what is the wind? And being robust to hold it to that is like we stay on shore, we we don't go out because our procedures and our guidelines say don't go out if it's above 10 knots of wind, right? You're not trained above that capacity, and whilst you're only going to be 500 meters from shore at the furthest point, the procedures say to stay within that range. So we can the activity that day, and then they did a bit of a sheltered paddle later on in the afternoon in a different place where it was, you know, more adequate. And the reason I bring the story up is that it's so easy for facilitators on the ground, and sometimes this is driven from the top, especially when there's an expectation to deliver on the activity for the the customer or the client or the participant that people will bend their rules and procedures. Whereas, and again, this comes back to the idea that having the paperwork in place means that you have your central point of truth. And if you have your central point of truth, that's what you stick to, even if it means forgoing the day's activity or forgoing the expedition or having to completely alter your plans just because you don't want to cross that one kilometer stretch of water, which you could probably do in 20 minutes, but the conditions don't allow for it because that's what our procedure state and that keeps you back to that central point of truth. And I just wanted to bring that up as a case point for listeners and maybe to get your your thoughts on how organizations can approach holding themselves to their own guidelines, even when outside pressures might be pushing for them to deliver on uh a set program that you have have sold to them.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

Yeah, thank you so much for that. I love using a story like that as an entry point into the larger concepts, you know, that it might represent. So you've you've offered a really useful, a recent, you know, true case study that gives us some interesting ways to sort of like explore that. And I have three sort of observations to make. Um, I think it is super helpful for an organization to define their terms. And what I often see uh in organizations in the outdoor industry is people using certain terms kind of interchangeably, policies, procedures, guidelines, protocols, rules, and yet having internal culture or understanding that those things might be slightly different, and that some might be really set rules that are absolutely not to be broken, and others might be just more guidelines or suggestions, but are flexible, but they haven't done the more meaningful work of actually defining it that way uh and creating organizational consistency. You know, I I've seen organizations take the um useful approach of color coding in their manual, you know, the the difference between if something really is a hard and fast rule, you know, and there probably might not be that many, but like let's say the seatbelt is going to be on when you're moving in the van and the helmet's gonna be on when you're climbing, and the PFD is gonna be on when you're paddling. There are probably are certain rules that it would be very hard to imagine a situation where they they would not follow those rules, right? Um, but then they might also have things that aren't exactly hard and fast rules, uh, but and they might think of them as suggestions or guidelines or they have different terms for this. And maybe they could color code those a different color so that it is visually really clear to people what the what are the places where judgment and decision making might be appropriate, and where um if everything is a rule, I would suggest that people are probably having shortcuts and creating efficiencies and what I call workarounds all the time. And and I actually, that's my second point, is I actually think in the workarounds is where an organization can perhaps do the most learning. If everyone is working around your 18-step checklist of the things you're supposed to do before you are allowed to turn the key in the van, if everyone in the organization is working around that, I would suggest that you may not have a problem with your people. You might have a problem with the way the policy is written or the the way who were they involved in the creation of the checklist to begin with, and was it realistic? Or did it come from the top down from an insurance provider or someone in the office who doesn't understand, you know, this question of do you want me to follow the rules or do you want me to be in camp before midnight because I can only do one? Right, right. So so it's in the workarounds that we can actually have incredibly important and useful learning if we look at it more as a representation of the system and not necessarily a failure of the people, if you will, right. So that's that's a point I would make. And then um, I've seen situations, and they're rare, they're rare situations, but I've seen situations where breaking the rule was actually the safer choice because the rule was imperfect. The rules are always imperfect for the all the different possible myriad combinations of unique situations that we might find ourselves in. And you know, um, I don't know if you want to hear a story about an example that you're not. But absolutely go ahead, go ahead. A recent and fairly simple story um was an organization that uh was in Southern California doing some conservation work in a forest, and they found themselves um threatened by a rapidly approaching forest fire, which in this era of climate change is unfortunately an increasing um likelihood. So they found themselves on a Forest Service road. So they were in the, they were technically on a road, but they had more people than they had vehicles with seatbelts. And they decided that what they were going to do to get away from this rapidly approaching fire was just load people into the backs of pickup trucks and stuff them in vans and put them in the trunk and do whatever they needed to do to get the entire group out of the area, uh, breaking not only their internal policy but state law as well in the process. And after they did that, you know, they contacted me and they were like, you know, this is what just happened and this is how we approached it. And what's your feedback as our risk person? You know, and I said, You absolutely did the right thing here. You know, obviously, and you drove slowly down the road and you did what you needed to do to get these people to safety. And it highlights for me that the rules are always imperfect and that we need to think of our people as solutions to our safety problems, not the cause of our safety problems. And when people find themselves working around a rule or perhaps breaking a rule for a good reason instead of punishing them and assuming that they are the weak link in our otherwise perfect system, can we step back and ask, what can we learn from this? And what is it that we can take away about the systems that people are operating within, you know, just continue to help them make good choices in the future, like they did in this case, you know, as opposed to a sort of a black and white, you know, punishment for that. But imagine if that person got fired, you know, for doing doing what was the right thing to do in that case, because you had this no leniency policy, you know, this zero tolerance. You know, you can imagine that would it that would lead people to hide things in the future.

SPEAKER_01 45:01

100%. And and it comes back down to that organizational culture, okay? Like uh how supportive uh is the organization as a whole? And then you said, you know, imagine the person got fired. Imagine they didn't take those steps, imagine they had lost some kids because they hadn't put people in the back of the trucks. And I am brought back to a term that was first brought to my attention uh years and years and years ago, doing uh wilderness first aid is that concept of ideal to real. You've got your ideal situation, and if you if we've got everything and the systems in place for us to be able to deliver CPR in the right place, and we got someone on the phone, and we can get an ambulance there in 20 minutes that's that's ideal for you know a non-ideal situation. And then the reality is you've come across someone that you shouldn't move, but there's a rock slide on the way, and you've got all these different myriad of factors that could influence uh the decisions that we have to make. But that's where your professional development, your training, the supporting of staff, allowing them to think outside the box, which you know, fantastically for all the outdoor education companies out there that people typically come into this industry, come into this field, are generally quite good at thinking outside of the box and approaching really difficult and differing scenarios with a whole range of of ideas and and approaches to solve the problem. And I think there's some approaches that we can take, you know, with that idea of our guidelines or procedure, whatever it might be in that moment. You know, it comes back to the title of your book, Were We Lucky or Were We Good?

SPEAKER_00 46:50

Rob, I love that point you're making about ideal to real. And it leads me to think about a really central concept in safety science, which similarly is making a crisp comparison between what we call work as imagined and work as done. And work as imagined, of course, is what we imagine in the you know planning of the trip and the policies and this linear, neat and clean idea of exactly how things are going to go, following all the rules and everything's you know the way that we imagine it to be. And then work as done, which is you know, changing weather and student dynamics, and maybe the bus was late to begin with, and you know, it's 15-not uh wind out on the water, and you've got this organizational pressure, we can just cross this kilometer channel, and then we'll be achieving all of our goals for the day and the actual pressures of day-to-day operations. And so by framing it as work is imagined and work is done, and being open to this idea of learning from the workarounds and learning from the imperfections and the adaptations really, not imperfections, but more like the adapt adaptations that people have to make to get their job done all the time. It invites us to explore this more in a systems thinking kind of way rather than a blame the uh, you know, instructor kind of way. And I think it leads us to be able to more um safely ask people that question you raised of where we, you know, let's say we all get back at the end of that paddle and they're back milling around uh and getting ready to go off on their merry way, you know, that's a great time to ask, were we luckier were we good? Right? We we need to interrogate our successes just as much as we take a microscope to the failures because we succeed a whole lot more than we fail. And if all we do is examine the incidents and the ill, the the injuries and the critical things, if that's if all we do is look in our failures for learning and improving our safety systems, we don't have enough of those to actually improve much. And the ironically, the safer we are, the less we then have to learn from, right? So, so we should not be looking to learn from our failures only. We should also really be asking, why do we normally succeed? What are those ingredients? Were we lucky or were we good? How can we learn every day instead of waiting for some tragedy to occur and then taking a magnifying glass to it with this gift of hindsight and try to pretend that that's going to give us the information, you know, about every the stuff that was happening the other 99 days.

SPEAKER_01 49:48

You're so right. And still brought back to that idea of the power of the people in the middle leadership, like your program director, or not maybe so much the facilitators or out who are in the program, but maybe them as well, and also the leadership. One of the things that I see potentially standing in the way of the celebration of successes is the uh humbleness that a lot of outdoor educators and facilitators bring to it. The expectation is that you do your job and you do it well, and you you bring home everybody at the end of the trip with as few injuries as possible. The idea that someone as a facilitator might want to raise their hand and say, Hey, I was really good and this is how I was so good, that opportunity shouldn't maybe lie with the facilitator, but that should lie with the program director or the the one of the leaders in the organization. Would you have any tips or ideas on how organizations could start to initiate those conversations about looking at where things went well as a way of developing risk management strategies for their organization?

SPEAKER_00 51:00

Yeah, thank you. That's great. I think having those debriefs and having those conversations like you're describing feel different if you have already done the work of introducing some of these other larger frameworks, like this idea of work as imagined and work as done. Establishing up front that it's okay if there is some difference between what we imagined this trip was going to be like, or even like what the policy book says, if the if we establish up front that this is about learning from within everyday work and um workarounds are normal, incidents are normal, near misses are normal, and that we need to be learning from all of these things. If we've already established and reframed that so that, you know, people aren't entering into that conversation either, afraid to sort of report, like if I report this near miss, what happens to me? You know, are people going to talk about me or talk to me? So, so you can, you know, dispelling some of that piece. But I think you brought up a really interesting one as well, which is about a little bit of that humility of like, I expect to bring all of my students back with their lives happily changed. And I expect to come back with every student that I left with. And um, I expect the um repel or the ab sale, as you might say, to go, you know, seamlessly. And you know, it might be harder for people to um pat themselves in the back for a job well done until we reframe to them the idea that we don't want to be just waiting for tragedies to learn from them. We need to be learning from our successes as well as from our failures, and near misses are a really interesting bridge between those two things because a near miss is not uh it's not um exactly a success, but it's not a failure either. You can see it from there. You're in the right neighborhood, right? But um, I think learning to have a safe space to really truly talk about near misses, not in a punitive, blaming and shaming, punishing kind of way, but more in a learning kind of a way, can invite the bigger conversation. And, you know, I like to ask things like, what surprised you today? Was there anything that was different than you expected it to be? Um, when did you, as the trip leader, feel like you were relying on luck rather than on your plan or your strategy or your systems? You know, what can we learn from that?

SPEAKER_01 53:44

What could what can we do as an organization that would stop this from being worst case scenario? Because then to go back to language, using the language of what can we do as an organization that would stop this happening in the future, not what can you do to make sure that you don't do this again, right? Framing it as the organizational culture and the organizational responsibility rather than the individual.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

Yeah, that's beautiful, Rob. And I have one kind of a slightly heavy uh kind of a way to frame this, and I I hesitate to say it like this, but I I think it is it does tend to make the point, which is that you know, if we believe that a normal day at work does include some really well-designed, effected work, and maybe some workarounds, and maybe some near misses, and uh maybe some human errors that are made that don't result in a bad outcome, don't result in some sort of a consequence. We get away with it. If we believe that that is actually a normal work day, then the what we come to see is that the ingredients for our worst day at work are already here today. The same workarounds, the same human errors, the same imperfect rules and regulations, the same pressures and equipment failures, and that they just haven't combined together in a way to have that tragic outcome. Yeah. But that the ingredients for your worst day are actually here now. And so where that leads us is back to this idea of don't wait. Don't wait for the tragedy. Try to learn every day, try to interrogate your workarounds, your human errors, your um the times when you get lucky rather than good, and try to use every single one of those days as a chance to continuously improve and understand where risk can be hiding in our daily successes, is really how I would say that. Yeah. So um it's a little bit heavy, um, but I do think that it it invites us to sort of understand the importance of those like be like daily debriefs and learning every day instead of waiting for the tragedy to occur and then doing some big report on that.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

No, it's it's fantastic, and we've covered so much uh already, Steve. And I can't believe we we had quite a big outline for today. I think maybe we're 50% through it. What I would like to just touch on as we start to round up, we're definitely going to have to have a second one of these conversations. That is a guarantee. But you've mentioned it a few times, it's in the title of your book, is Safety Science, trying to dial this into the scientific foundations of how we manage and how we deal with risk, understanding that there can be benefits, understanding that there's certain necessities to be included. Could you just just give us some of the outlines on what do you mean by that idea and kind of philosophy of taking a safety science approach?

SPEAKER_00 57:10

Yeah, thank you. So kind of like my first book, where I was standing on the shoulders of the giants in the outdoor in the wilderness risk management world. Uh, in my second book, I am again standing on the shoulders of the giants of the safety researchers who have uh really codified lessons learned from research and models and learning from big events. Um, you know, going back to the book starts with the industrial revolution, if you could believe that. And it moves forward in time through big events, uh, nuclear power, Three Mile Island, the Space Shuttle Challenger, all the way up to like current events at Boeing or in the medical world where people working in the medical industry have been criminally prosecuted for making uh a human error within a larger healthcare system. And so there has been just a trip, there is a tremendous um community of safety science authors and researchers that uh I have spent the last five years or so kind of doing my own, I guess, self-directed dissertation uh in reading a lot of the primary sources, going to their conferences, meeting these folks. I can't tell you, Rob, how welcoming they've been to me. This somewhat of an outlier in their world. You know, they work in nuclear power or aeronautics or oil and gas, and they've been so welcoming to me. Um, and I've really tried my best to take the lessons learned from this larger community and distill it down into models and um stories and case studies and things like what we've been talking about on this call for my community. And I I feel a little bit like Robin Hood because I'm robbing from these multi-trillion dollar industries, uh, you know, and I'm bringing these concepts back to the nonprofits in the schools and the camps and the small programs that I work with. But it has been a real huge learning for me.

SPEAKER_01 59:13

To all the dirt bags and the outdoors.

SPEAKER_00 59:17

Well, exactly right. Yeah, well, which I have proudly been, you know, at different times in my life and hope to hope to be again someday. So so yeah, so safety science really is a social science that uses scientific methods to evolve and improve the management of safety in the workplace. And so I'm using those concepts like work is imagined and work as done is a good example, learning from workarounds. Um, a lot of the kind of terms and things that we've been using in this conversation today come from that, um come from that community.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

Brilliant. And if you could then flash forward, you know, five, ten years, what do you feel the meaningful progress within this area would look like?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:03

Yeah, beautiful. I'm already seeing uh a lot of folks doing a great job of starting to wrap their heads around the implications of learning from outside of our community. Um, we have much to learn from our outdoor safety experts, but we also have a huge amount to learn. Um, like what's going on, what is our version uh of the Space Shuttle Challenger, and what can we learn from that? Or what's going on with organizational culture at Boeing, and how can we take lessons from that and apply them to ourselves? And when we criminalize someone in a in a hospital who has made an error and we're gonna criminally punish them for um something that was actually induced by the system in which they were working, did they make a bad choice or did they only have bad choices available to them? You know, and how can we how can we take those lessons for ourselves? So, you know, I think we're actually already doing it and we just need to keep going with that. And um, you know, I hope that my safety science book is uh is a part of the story of our industry um looking outside of our industry to continue to evolve the way not just that we do safety, but the way that we think about it. It's it's changing sort of sort of some of our underlying beliefs.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:26

That's brilliant, Steve. It really is. And uh my final question for you today, Steve, is if you could speak directly to every outdoor educator or school leader who might be listening today, what single shift in mindset do you think would be a really good starting point for them?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:45

I would invite you to think about what is going on in your school or in your program that helps us to make a very important shift from blaming to learning. And asking yourself, do we know why things normally go well on our programs? And can we learn from can we continuously improve and learn every day instead of waiting for some tragic event to occur? Um, is safety the absence of incidents or is it the presence of something that we can actually um design for and measure and pursue? So that's one of the biggest shifts in safety science is realizing that safety is not just the absence of incidents, but it's the presence of capacities. And what are the capacities within your school that help people speak up when they have a safety concern and create learning instead of blaming and make it easier to do the right thing instead of just punishing them when they do the wrong thing? So I think there's a really important role that leadership um can play and that leadership can't dictate safety from the top down, but they sure can stop it from the top down, depending on the way that they approach the you know, the organizational um routines and um people's ability to speak up when they have concerns and all that. So I hope that that's uh it's really uh as I said earlier, it's a it's kind of a shift in sort of some of those foundational beliefs.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:21

Brilliant. Uh and Steve, just uh as we wrap up here today, where can listeners find out more about experiential consulting, uh, your writing, and your work on uh uh safety.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:35

Yeah, thanks, Rob. So I can't believe that this domain name was available, but uh I got outdoorrisk.com. And so you can just go to outdoorrisk.com and learn more about um me and the amazing team that we have here at Experiential Consulting. There's eight of us now doing this work, uh, two of us full-time and a really talented group of associate consultants who are um pulled in as needed for you know opportunities to work with clients who match their expertise. We are offering uh classes on safety science now that are online classes that folks can take and dive into enhancing the learning that they would get from the book and um a beneficial risk class as well, by the way. And um uh, you know, I think that the having a podcast like this, Rob, is uh really a great gift to the outdoor community to give people a way instead of waiting for a conference to learn. How about we learn every day by listening to Rob's podcast and engaging in, you know, lessons learned across some really some of the wonderful people that you're bringing together to help us be learning and improving all the time. Uh so yeah, really appreciate just the community of practice that you are uh at the center of. And this was one of the most interesting conversations I think I've had on anyone's podcast. So I'm very grateful for that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:02

Oh, Steve, that's very kind of you. I really, really appreciate it. Uh, for our audience, you'll find the links to Steve's work and experiential uh consulting in the show notes. And uh, Steve, thanks so much for sharing your time and your insight. It's really been uh a fantastic reminder that safety is not just about removing uncertainty, but learning to understand it, be more honest, learning from it effectively, seeing where the benefits are and how we can help people and organizations to become more thoughtful and capable and human in how they engage with safety and risk. As I said, you'll find links to Steve's work in the show notes. And if you've enjoyed today's episode, please help us grow by liking, subscribing, and sharing the Outdoor Education podcast. Special thanks to Gus Merkel for today's show production. You'll find all the details and links. in the show notes and if you've enjoyed today's conversation please like subscribe and share the outdoor education podcast to help us reach even more people who care about outdoor and experiential learning