Demystifying the Art of Group Decision Making - Online Classroom

6:30 - 8:00pm PST via Zoom Meeting
Meeting link will be sent to registered attendees the day of the session.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. There are many decisions to make on trips and the “right” decision is not always obvious. As a leader, there are many ways for you to make decisions on trips. You can make them yourself; you can throw them to the group for democratic decision, or you can use some style in-between. For a given decision, one style may be more appropriate than others. Over the years, I’ve developed a process for collaborative group decisions which I’ve come to prefer because it has some nice features:

• It gets people’s opinions out in the open
• It encourages discussion
• It comes to a definite decision in a finite amount of time (usually)
• Everyone understands how the decision was made and buys into it

The goal of the workshop is to give attendees enough knowledge and experience that they can confidently use this process to guide group decisions on their future trips. While the process seems simple, there are a few important subtleties, and we’ll spend time discussing examples and practicing.

In order to provide good feedback and inclusive discussion, space in this workshop is limited. Please attend or cancel so others may attend. 

Resources

Attendees should expect to review a few short reading materials to prepare for this workshop. These will be sent out several days in advance.

Seminar Notes

This presentation will encourage attendees to speak up throughout the presentation and be interactive with prompting discussion questions interspersed within lecture segments. 

PRESENTER

Tom Unger grew up in Michigan, family camping and messing around in small boats on rivers and big lakes.  In 1989 he moved to Seattle to be near mountains and the ocean.  In 1993 he joined the mountaineers, got equivalency for basic climbing, completed the intermediate climbing course, and became a climb leader.  That started his 4-decade carrier of exploring the outdoors in various modes, including:

• hiking and backpacking, especially traverses in the Sierra,
• crag and alpine climbing
• back country skiing
• canyoneering in Utah
• sailing in the great lakes and Salish sea
• scuba diving in Puget sound and the tropics
• flying small planes here and in the Idaho and Utah backcountry
• canoeing and packrafting locally and in the arctic
• sea kayaking in the Salish sea and the coast of Candida and Alaska