Were We Lucky, or Were We Good?

Steve Smith
2 days ago
3 min read

If 100 climbers cross a heavily crevassed glacier unroped, but only one falls into a crevasse -- how many were safe? We can rule one out, obviously -- but were the remaining 99 lucky, or good?

Outdoor and experiential education programs don't have to wait for things to go wrong to learn from them, we can learn every day, even when things appear to be normal or mundane. This blog explores how one simple question can help to reframe our lens from focusing on outcome, to focusing on process.

The team at Experiential Consulting likes using this question of "were we lucky, or good?" with our clients as a way to foster deeper learning about everyday programs, everyday work. Why focus on everyday work? Erik Hollnagel once asked, "what is happening when nothing is happening?" This refers to the societal tendency to think about safety as the ABSENCE of incidents and injuries. So safety, in this regard, is only present when "nothing happens." However, this is, of course, a misperception of all that actually is happening in order to create or maintain safety.

Safety arises from human adaptation, creativity, continuous adjustments, and critical thinking -- not from "nothing happening." In other words, safety is not the absence of incidents or injuries, it is the presence of capacities and controls that effectively keep hazards at bay.

Examples of these capacities may include:

Stopping an activity due to a safety concern
Changing plans or itinerary to better match changing conditions, group abilities, or group dynamics
Adjusting the nature or timing of an activity to better align with organizational outcomes, mission, or risk tolerance
Deferring to expertise at the ground level, not just based on role or authority
Building in spare capacity to adjust to unexpected weather, delays, or routine challenges
Seeking input from various sources before making a safety-critical decision
Speaking up against team pressure or any authority gradient that may lead us to take risks we would not normally take (like the people in the glacier/crevasse story may have experienced)
What would you add to this list? (Please add a comment on this article if you like)

In other words, just because "nothing bad happened" doesn't equate to "nothing is happening."

Everyday work is actually full of these elements, and more. But we can only learn about them if we examine our successes as well as our failures, including near-misses. Near-misses may be especially helpful, in fact, though they are often under-reported and under-examined.

So when a group gets back to camp safely after a peak climb, or a day trip returns safely to the trailhead after an adventure, rather than disperse, it's best to invite some reflection: Were we lucky, or were we good?

Examples of useful topics that might emerge include:

Ways in which we were caught off guard by changing conditions
Confusion about policy and procedure
Differing ideas about how to manage a technical activity
Differing ideas about risk tolerance - how far to push things to achieve our goals
Being surprised by something working that we expected to fail
Learning that a piece of equipment or a technique performed much better than we expected
Seeing a connection between an outcome, and the process we used that led to that outcome

As the preceding list shows, there is MUCH we can learn from daily, everyday events -- we don't have to wait for tragedies to occur to learn and improve, we can do that every day. Start by asking: Were We Lucky, or Were We Good?