Practicing Good Judgement in the Outdoors - Online Classroom

6:30pm on Zoom Meeting.  Finish at 8:00pm

A link will be sent to login to the Zoom meeting in advance of this session.

Join this workshop to think about and discuss practical risk management:  practical ways to think about risk management when organizing a trip and while you are on the trip.  Useful for everyone and particularly for leaders.

The practical risk management ideas we will discuss are based on my presentation in the 2018 Mountaineer’s Leadership Conference.  They are all, in essence, ways of thinking that help you identify and stop sequences of events that may lead to an incident. 

This is the first offering of this workshop and the format is experimental.  My goal is to get people thinking about risk management in the framework I presented.  My plan is to use scenarios as the basis for discussion.  If all goes well, we will have a good discussion about risk management and you will have new tools for future trips.

You have work to do in preparation for the workshop.

• Watch my presentation on Practical Risk Management. (1 hour)
• Write out a scenario that calls for some risk management thinking.

Take some time to write out a good scenario.  It is best if the scenario is something that can play out across multiple activities.  It should not be contingent on specialized or technical knowledge in an activity.  Keep it brief, no more than half a page of text.  Many can be trimmed to just their essence by eliminating unnecessary details.  And then, be specific about what the exercise is.

You have planned a packraft (one person, light, inflatable rafts) trip down an Alaskan river.  One participant wants to build a solar powered drive system for it.  It will require a big solar panel, a battery, and a thruster.  Total weight of this equipment might be about 10 lbs.  This system has yet to be built and you have never had anything like this on a previous trip.

Exercise:  Identify 2-3 risks. How will you manage these?

You don't need to answer the question.  That is the exercise we will do during the workshop.

Please get them to me by Sunday evening.  I’ll choose the most applicable and approachable scenarios.

I am donating my time to create this seminar and we are charging a small fee to bring some revenue into The Mountaineers.