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Dislocated Generation

27/5/2019

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There’s a significant problem for kids today and that’s the fact that their generation is emotionally dislocated. There’s been a seismic shift in technology in the last fifteen years and, as a result, it’s caused significant changes to the way in which kids are growing up and the influences on their lives. Unfortunately, the pace of change has outpaced a lot of parents and schools’ ability to adapt. Often parents have used devices as makeshift babysitters and this has done immeasurable damage to their children’s abilities to think for themselves, problem-solve, develop real relationships, cope with real people and deal with complex situations. Whilst many would profess it’s all part of learning about technology, there’s a huge difference between learning about technology and being leveraged by it. Kids have now become disassociated from many important parts of society and the way in which those before us have grown up and matured into adulthood.

Now this could be a phenomenal advance in humankind, although I’m quite doubtful of that. The reality is that this dislocation is leading to  long-term problems with mental health, with resilience, with the ability for a child to adapt to new circumstances and their ability to problem solve and relate to others. So many factors are involved in this social dislocation and much of it comes from overindulgence and the super reliance on technology. Therefore, how do we address this? How do we even get to the root cause of this, when so many parents are happy just to throw a device at their kids and consider it to be an acceptable method of  babysitting. Job done! Parenting done!

For many ‘busy’ parents, it seems to make sense. The children aren’t making a noise and the justifications fly thick and fast. I’m busy with life. I’m busy answering emails, I’m busy with work or whatever other nonsense excuse they want to make to justify a lack of effort in being involved with their child’s life. However, for many parents in the early stages of their child’s life, it’s almost genius! I’ve thrown a device at them whether it be a laptop, a phone, a tablet or whatever and it’s keeping them occupied. Well, from one point of view, this is really handy because you can throw a device at the child and suddenly the  problem is solved! No more screaming, no more ‘I’m bored!’ You can get back to sipping your latte with friends as they play with the device for hours and hours and hours and access all sorts of things that you don’t want them accessing, but because you’re too busy, sipping said latte, to provide any level or supervision, a firewall, content filters, content barriers or even a passcode on the device, they’re now interacting with an unfiltered adult world, full of marketing, phishing and bright flashing pop-ups to click on.

However, when we look at bit deeper than the general dangers of an unfiltered internet, what’s the real cost of this handy babysitting by device? One of the most obvious ones which we’re now seeing in education is that whenever kids are challenged with real world issues, this is where it all starts to fall apart. Whenever a child doesn’t get what they want, this reinforces the problem, because many kids have been indulged to the point where they have been told: ‘They’re perfect,’ or ‘they’re wonderful,’ or ‘they’re amazing!’ They can do anything they possibly want to. The world is theirs for them. Anyone who is half-intelligent and has experienced something of the world for themselves, realises this isn’t the case. Sadly, nobody’s told the students that, for fear of breaking the ‘everyone’s a winner rule’. The reality is when kids stumble, what happens? They look for somebody to blame. They look for excuses. They look for the magical, ‘Yeah, but solution’ which everyone knows does not contain a solution at all. I’ve seen this progressively building over the last ten years. The ‘Yeah, but’ approach has increased to a phenomenal level.

Previously, you still were given the ‘Yeah, but’ for many students however, the reality was it wasn’t that often and there wasn’t much behind it. Now, everything is questioned. Everything is ‘Yeah, but’ and there’s no real reason for this. It presumes that the child knows more about the world than those teaching them. In some subjects, that might be true, for example in coding. Whenever I’ve taught computer studies, I’ve always been blown away by the ability of some students who have taught themselves to code and do a stack of things on computers for which I don’t have the skills. However, how does this translate into an understanding of real world applications? They might have the skills to code. They might have the skills to develop something from a tech point of view but what happens when they have to socialise and communicate with others? The life  experience of educators therefore becomes even more important when teaching, as the content might be easy to replicate, but the unpredictability of real world means only through our experiences can we truly learn and understand why we do something.

The ‘Yeah, but’ is just the tip of the iceberg for the lack of communication skills and this is where parents and schools and technology are failing kids. This is where all of these three factors are combining to create a significant long term problem that’s going to re-shape the work force. It’s going to cause issues with the next generation in terms of relationships, parenting and work. If we fail to address it as educators, we risk letting the dislocated generation waste years of their lives trying to find meaning and be able to build some muscle when they realise they’re not perfect and the world isn’t just there to serve them. Despite huge leaps and bounds in technology, we’re letting children develop into more emotionally vulnerable young adults because they can’t understand how to fail and bounce back and they can’t understand how to communicate with real people in real time.

However, this is something that can be addressed by parents. It’s something that can be addressed by schools and it’s something that needs to be addressed urgently before the horse that’s bolted rides too far off into the sunset. We can’t leave this for another ten years until suddenly everybody realises, ‘Wait a minute, it’s out of control!’ It’s already out of control. It’s already ridden away from us but being able to realise that now, means we’re ten years ahead of not doing anything about it at all.

What difference can you make to your own child’s life? What difference can you make to the life of the friends of your children? Are they going to be developing healthy, happy relationships? Are they going to be developing in a positive manner and become resilient and be able to face all of life’s challenges no matter how hard they might be? Or are they going to be in this fantasy world where suddenly, as soon as they’re challenged with something that’s difficult, they go to pieces. What if they don’t get in to the course they want? They go to pieces. What if they don’t get in to the sports team they want? They go to pieces. What if they don’t get the participation award that they want? They go to pieces. What if they don’t get the job they want? You get the picture?

This is a situation that is totally and utterly detrimental to society and one we must address. Again, the causes of it are the combination of poor parenting, overuse of technology and the failure of the education system to modernise. With all three areas failing at some point we may end up doing serious harm to our next generation.

Education has fallen behind so far it’s not funny. Teachers are still approaching education in the fantasy world that was 19th century education. We fill a classroom, you teach a lesson and they go to the next class. You do it over and over and over again and you basically teach the average and get the average result for the average students. That’s why they love their bell curves because you can be guaranteed that you will get a bell curve on every single assessment. Every single class will have the wonderful bell curve. It’s a total load of crap because why are we aiming for bell curves? Why are we not aiming for wins for everybody? Now that is a little bit of an overstatement because some people are just lazy and useless and will never move from their well defended position at the bottom. However, we’re not talking about them as, until they find their internal motivation, they will remain right at the bottom of everything they do. However, the more dislocated the group of students, the more chance they will be on the wrong end of the bell.

For educators one of the real challenges is helping students find that internal motivation. It can make average students brilliant and brilliant students actually find the job that they really want to be doing and not just become a doctor or a lawyer because they get good marks, bearing in mind lawyers will soon be automated to the point that we don’t need as many of them as we have today, a win in everyone’s books really.

When I do goal setting with students, I always pose this question to them: ‘Do you want a doctor who is passionate about helping people?’ Or ‘Do you want a doctor who is in it for the money?’ Every single time I get the answer: ‘Somebody who is passionate about helping patients.’ We all want that and this is a great opportunity because this generation has this belief that they can change the world. Many might claim this is a misguided belief, but I don’t believe that at all because I believe this next generation can change the world. We need to empower them with the confidence to try, to fail, to overcome massive obstacles and to endure. This can’t be done with social and emotional skills gained from having a digital device as a babysitter.

For parents and teachers, this creates a great opportunity. So in one sense, you have a group of young impressionable kids and young adults who want to make a difference and who believe they can, but what they really need is for somebody to show them how to make that difference. How to cope with challenges. How to cope with disappointment. How to cope with failure. How to face problems. How to solve problems. How to become resilient. How to contribute to the community to make that difference. This is where the teacher’s life experience now becomes so much more valuable than content knowledge and the ability to stand in front of a room and dictate the encyclopedia.

You can teach technical skills to almost anybody. That’s easy in comparison with the empathy, caring and the emotional resilience that’s needed for our next generation to thrive in the rapidly changing digital world. Whilst parents have had the mistaken belief that they can do this by telling their kids: ‘They’re perfect,’ ‘be safe’ and ‘don’t do this,’ ‘don’t do that,’ don’t take risks.’ However, this has caused immeasurable damage and needs to be addressed. It’s through a modern, proactive experiential educational framework that this can be achieved. We can create wonderful learning opportunities that last a lifetime. We can do it in schools. We can do it at home. We can do it to ensure that we have a wonderful and proactive generation of thoughtful, resilient young men and women leading our businesses, our communities and our governments into the next generation and those generations after that, but we cannot be idle in our approach and must do something about it now.
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Technology has provided a vehicle to rapidly advance so many things in society and make them more efficient and more effective but without the core social and emotional skills to master technology and to master our own lives then we risk the technology mastering everyone who uses it instead. We risk the dislocated generation failing to make good on their vision to change the world and make it a better place, which is something none of us want to see.
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An Unexpected Expedition

20/5/2019

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There’s nothing like a few random events and incidents to shape how exciting an expedition can be. One time, I had a group of Year 9s out on a mountain biking expedition and we headed to Canberra to ride Mount Stromlo.
 
Mount Stromlo, just south of Canberra, is an amazing area to mountain bike. We’d been doing a number of training and skills’ development sessions leading up to this final expedition. To start with, we’d done an introductory mountain bike course, an overnight down at Mogo, which has an awesome downhill called the snake track, and now, Stromlo was the biggest and final challenge for the students.
 
Getting down there in the afternoon, with a few coffee breaks along the way, we started riding the playground area. The playground is a cool part of the mountain which has different obstacles, drop downs, seesaws, berms and all sorts of things you might encounter on a ride up or down the mountain. It’s a great area to teach and reinforce some basic mountain biking skills before tackling something much harder. This went really well and we had a great ride that afternoon. That evening, we went into camp, set up, cooked dinner and settled in for the night. The only thing was that it wasn’t the warmest of evenings, dropping down to -3 C overnight. Waking up the next morning, the tents were covered in a thick layer of frost. To be honest, this is typical camp weather at this time of year, but it’s still bracing when getting out of the tent.
 
The morning was also thick with fog. Again, typical in and around Canberra due to the confluence of all the hot air that’s created in parliament and settles each morning to blanket the city with a layer that’s harder to see through than a public service investigation report. Whilst this layer usually burns off by about 11am, it didn’t disperse until well after lunch, making it a still cold, but now crystal clear  afternoon.
 
Having ridden up and down the summit once that day and after lunch we were out on an extended ride. Being Canberra, a lot of the tracks are named after political things or euphemisms. So, for example, Pork Barrel, Double Dissolution and Party Line are all different tracks on the mountain.
 
Going down Pork Barrel, which is an awesome run, one of the boys hadn’t quite judged the steepness of the run as well as he should have. Flying over his handle bars, he didn’t bounce very well and managed to land hard on his knee. With a fairly obvious tear in his pants and a laceration to the side of his knee, I pulled out my first aid kit, put my gloves on and had a look. It was quite deep and deep to the point where you’re seeing the whiteness underneath the top layers of skin. I cleaned out the wound that had a nice bit of grit in it, attached some steri-strips to hold it together and put a sterile dressing over the top. It was one of those border-line cuts that if you were at home, you wouldn’t bother with stitches, but if you’re out on an expedition and not able to take things easy, then it’s probably worth getting them just to be sure.
 
Not deterred by this, the boy jumped back on his bike and kept riding. We continued along a different track which headed back towards the base of the mountain. With a few more ups and downs, and what I thought was some fairly light afternoon riding, suddenly, the next boy was off his bike and landed hard on his wrist. For this one, I took a look at his wrist. Despite having gloves on, he’d landed on his palm and a sharp rock had torn through the glove and a gritty bloody residue remained.
 
I cut his glove off with my shears, inspected the wound and quickly stopped the bleeding before cleaning it as best I could and bandaging. Because it was so deep, getting in there and trying to clean anything out was a little bit beyond what I wanted to be trying by the side of the track. Added to this, the complaint of the hot pain in his wrist was a worry as well. Rather than patch and keep riding on this one, I strapped the boy’s wrist, bandaged it up and walked the rest of the way down the hill with him and the other walking wounded to the car park and finished for the day.
 
Since both students required a little bit more medical assistance than I could provide, I decided to take them into the hospital. The last time I was in Canberra hospital, I was supposed to be in and out of there in an hour. However, it turned out to be seven hours and I had to stay overnight. Given this was the last experience, I decided that we should have dinner first, which was nachos that the boys had made with guacamole dip, salsa and sour cream. It was great meal, one of the best camping meals I’ve had in a long time. We quickly had that before we jumped into the troopie and headed off to hospital.
 
It’s always interesting when you turn up to hospital with multiple students with injuries for the same activity. You get the ‘you’re an irresponsible teacher look from everyone around you.’ So after checking both of the boys in with the triage nurse, we sat and waited whilst getting stared at by those around us. Remarkably enough, we probably only waited about twenty minutes at the most, which was exceptionally good timing considering the last time that I had to wait in Canberra Hospital. The boys were seen by two different doctors who were quite amused by the whole afternoon’s events and being mountain bike riders themselves, didn’t give me the ‘you’re irresponsible look’ after I explained what had happened.
 
It turned out though, because one of the boys was over the age of 15, under the ACT Laws, due to an accident in a public place, he had to undergo a mandatory blood alcohol testing. As a result, this boy had his blood taken and sent off to the police for analysis, which he thought was pretty exciting.
 
The other boy, as his tetanus shot was out of date, he had to get a tetanus injection. Hence we had the needle nurse who came to take blood out of one and then back to jab the other. I saw all of this as I moved between the two emergency beds and chatted with both the doctors. The end result was one student with six stitches and a blood alcohol test, but thankfully no fractures in his wrist. The other had three stitches and a painful jab in the arm. All in all, a reasonable result!
 
The boys were quickly discharged from hospital and on the way back, we had to for the ‘mandatory fast food run after a trip to hospital’ drive.  I managed to make my calls to their parents from the warmth of McDonald’s whilst eating a caramel sundae. It was sub zero outside, so we were in no hurry to get back. After dessert, we went to the shops, grabbed a few things such as  milk and chocolate and back to camp.
 
Everyone was asleep when we arrived around 10pm and it was even colder here than it had been in town. I quickly sorted  myself out for bed. Jumping inside my sleeping bag, I had a pleasant, long, cosy sleep.
 
The next morning, I checked on the boys and unfortunately given the injuries, we decided that we couldn’t ride because we didn’t have any spare staff to look after the injured and effectively supervise the rest of the group. Hence I decided that as we were in Canberra, we could have a look at a few things around the place.
 
We started at The Australian War Memorial, but turned up too early, so we ended up going to the cafe for coffee and cakes before heading inside. I always love going to The War Memorial and to hear a really interesting interview with the Memorial’s director, Dr Brendan Nelson, check out  Xperiential Education. We never seem to have enough time there, but on every trip, I always learn something new.
 
After this, I rang the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office. Yes, I know he’s now no longer the Deputy PM, but before his philandering day, I worked on his campaign, after running against him at preselection. Unfortunately, he had back to back meetings but his secretary organised for us to have a tour in Parliament and tickets to Question Time.
 
Question Time is a big thing in Australia where all the politicians are in the house and questions are asked of the Prime Minister or the various ministers. Some questions are with notice so they are pre-known by the questionee and some questions are without notice, but generally still known to the person. It’s more theatrics than anything else. I’ve actually done some of the preparation work for this in the past where you prepare a briefing for each question that’s going to be asked. Generally, the politician doesn’t bother answering the question anyway and instead answers something else completely.
 
Before going in, we’d parked in the basement. The troop carriers that we were in were too tall to go in the general car park and so I drove up to the oversize vehicle car park, took a ticket from the machine and drove in. Glancing back in the rear view mirror I notice the other 4WD drive in straight after me. Despite the bright yellow boom gate, the driver had not realised that he had to actually stop and press the button for a ticket. Now we’d managed to get two vehicles into the parking lot with only one ticket. ‘Well, that’s going to be an interesting problem to solve when we’re leaving.’
 
After explaining to my colleague that the big yellow barrier means stop and collect a ticket, we headed up to security and through into Parliament where our guide was waiting in the foyer. We’d managed to all get through security without issue, or that was what we thought until the other instructor was marched over to us by a security guard to let me know to start the tour, as he’d been caught with a credit card knife in his wallet and had to go and have a chat with the federal police as it’s a prohibited weapon in the ACT.
 
I was trying not to laugh in front of the boys because even though it was pretty funny, it wouldn’t have looked good laughing about it. Unfortunately, this didn’t work when the boys all broke out in laughter. I wished him luck and off we went, with the boys speculating on whether or not we would have to bail him out of jail that afternoon.
 
On the tour, I ran into a couple of politicians I knew, briefly saying hello and moving on so as not to distract the guide from his talk. We finally caught up with the other instructor at the end of the tour. Luckily for him, he wasn’t charged with anything but he had to surrender the knife to the police.
 
We headed back out the front of Parliament, where we made our lunches before heading back in for Question Time. Since the Deputy PM’s secretary had organised tickets, we managed to skip the line and were ushered straight in to the southern gallery which looks straight down on the government benches. Question time was the usual back and forth and nowhere near as exciting as one time years ago when people were getting dragged out by security and the place went into lock down. Having said that, it was an entertaining afternoon and kept us out of the cold for a bit.
 
Finishing up at Parliament, we managed to drive both 4WDs out of the parking lot by running them bumper to bumper. Ok, so there were probably other better solutions, but this was the most challenging and fun one to try. Then we drove back out to camp. It was now later afternoon and getting quite cold, but despite the random change of plans, the boys had a solo activity to do. They had one hour to write a final reflection on their experience on camp and what they had learnt from these experiences. Whilst most of them probably wrote about the instructor getting taken by security for possessing an illegal weapon, hopefully others wrote a little more reflectively.
 
By the end of the hour, the sun had dropped behind the hills and it was freezing cold. I wrapped up the activity at 5pm then we were all ready and headed back into town for dinner.
 
Wait a minute! What did we go to Canberra for again? Sometimes, in outdoor ed, events can dictate the program, or at least changes to the program if and when things don’t go to plan. The best thing to do is to be flexible, adaptable and always know there’s another learning experience and teachable moments outside of what was originally planned. Going forward with an activity just for the sake of the activity more often than not can lead to negative outcomes. It’s always good to be able to adapt and change plans if circumstances dictate. In this case, we had to do it because of injuries, but in other cases it could be weather, equipment or a range of other random possibilities that are sometimes hard to predict. Ultimately, it was still an interesting couple of days and a memorable expedition and adventure for all involved.
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Fushimi Inari-Taisha Shrine

13/5/2019

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​The Fushimi Shrine in Kyoto is one of the most iconic temples in Japan. Its distinctive path of orange gates wind their way up the side of a mountain, which is revered as sacred. Along this path of gates as it winds it way up the mountain, are a series of small shrines and grave stones and of course shops for everyone along the way.
 
The visit to this amazing site was both cultural and outdoor ed in its experience. At the very base is a market place filled with food stalls which emanate a wonderful aroma of hot Japanese delicacies. There are many girls dressed up in traditional Japanese Kimonos and if you really want, you can rent one in the many rental shops nearby. Despite the crowds, it was well worth getting something to eat here before going into the temple. I managed to find a beef skewer that I could afford. The standard ones were 500yen (about AUD$6.00). However the wagyu ones were 2,000yen (about $24.00). As meat on a stick goes, $24 is a bit out of my league, so I went for the cheaper option. However, the food’s not limited to this and you can get all sorts of things on a stick, from weird dessert like buns to octopus that look as if they’ve just had a visit from Vlad The Impailer. 

Before going there, I hadn’t really read up much on it, so I thought that it was a few gates that arched around in a bit of a circle. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The gates do loop around, but they go all the way up the mountain and back. A truly remarkable feat of design.
A Thousand Of Bright Orange Torii Gates
The place was crowded and of course everyone was trying to get a photo (or fifty) right at the start. The noise of the bustling crowd really made it hard to appreciate the significance and wonder of this site. I shuffled through the crowd, which once inside the gates, there was little chance of getting away from, until the crowd popped out at another temple and some shops. Looking at a ‘You Are Here!’ type map, I suddenly realised that this was just the beginning and the gates went on and on, all the way up the mountain. I continued to follow the crowd up the hill as it got steeper and the path turned into steps. Rising up to the next intersection, the path split and the crowd suddenly thinned out. Obviously, people had already taken enough photos of themselves with the orange gates that the thought of hiking to the top was too much for them to bear.
 
However, for me the experience of the temple and the sacred mountain only began at this point. There’s something very serene about walking through bamboo scattered forests and the bright orange contrast of the gates. There were hardly any people up here to ruin the experience with endless selfies, although I do admit to taking a few at the top. The absence of the crowd also meant that I was able to see more of the amazing details and the work that’s gone into building such a phenomenal structure.
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One Of The Many Fox Statues Across The Shrine Grounds
​Once I reached the top, which was gated by some rather unhappy looking fox-like statutes, I had a look around the highest shrine before descending into another gulley. As I walked down the many steps, suddenly a wind rippled through the bamboo. It was directional, by which I mean it was concentrated above my head in a very narrow band. You could imagine in years gone by, those making a pilgrimage to the mountain could have seen something like this as a passing dragon spirit. Hopefully the happy dragon type from ‘The Never Ending Story,’ rather than the angry, greedy type from ‘The Hobbit.’

​Regardless of this, it was a wonderful moment as the golden coloured autumn leaves were dislodged from their branches and glided down to the ground around me.
 
Continuing back down, the closer I came to the intersection, the greater the number of people there were until I finally popped out, just past the enormous frog shrine, back at the main temple at the base of the mountain.
 
This was both a great hike and a fascinating cultural experience. If you’re ever in Kyoto, this is a must, but wear your hiking boots as the real experience is only to be found beyond where most people give up. 
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Coronial Inquests

6/5/2019

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​This is probably one of the single most unpleasant things to read as an outdoor education and risk management professional, but it’s vitally important that any teacher taking a group of students anywhere reads and learns from the extremely tragic experiences that are outlined in any coronial inquest. The lessons learnt from these, must inform our approach to risk management and safety for every program we run.
 
There are often two dramatically different types of coronial reports. Firstly, the tragic accident, which could not be reasonably foreseen, and despite all efforts to respond, a life is lost. However, more often than not, it’s the second type of report and coronial finding that clearly demonstrates systemic failure and usually a series of events which with each step/poor decision/delay, leads to a fatality.
 
Whilst both are undeniably tragic, the second leaves families, schools and all those involved destroyed for life. As you read through one of these, the warning signs, deterioration of conditions and clear evidence that there’s a problem is usually abundantly clear. Whilst many would say it’s easy to see that in the rear-view mirror, which I agree is entirely true, as hindsight is very powerful, but often the obvious warning signs are there. Thus, understanding your environment, your group and the risks involved in what you’re doing, should have already provided you with enough insight to take the action needed to prevent a situation deteriorating into a critical or fatal situation.
 
What’s vitally important from this is the need for situational awareness. Instructors and teachers need to be aware of a range of factors (which are usually outlined in a risk assessment) and ensure they’re proactively considered and managed. Reading coronial reports is a horrible, but important part of that skills development for being aware of conditions and situations which have led to irreversible and tragic consequences.
 
I found myself in one such situation a number of years ago. We were out hiking west of Nowra and heading in towards Kangaroo Valley. It was a bright sunny and hot afternoon in February and a massive, angry storm rolled in faster than crazed shoe shoppers on Boxing Day. We were suddenly trapped on a ridge with pelting rain, lightning striking all around us and drilling the ground with no pause between the lightning and the deafening concussion of the thunder. Strike after strike after strike, it pinned us down. Perched on our packs in the ‘lightning position’ we could do nothing else other than stay clear of trees and wait out the storm. However, the storm persisted and hour after hour we had no option but to stay put.
 
Suddenly there was a break in the storm and the other group leader had the idea that we should keep going despite the conditions around us. We were heading towards a river which needed to be crossed to get to the camp site. We had saturated gortexes and some students were showing early signs of hyperthermia. It was not a good idea to press on, but full of bravado and telling the group that if we didn’t, the other group would think we were weak, a nauseating feeling hit me. This didn’t feel right. We had too many factors at play. The extreme weather, the equipment failure and the condition of the students. When something feels wrong, then you must act immediately. It’s not a matter of waiting to see what happens. Stop, regroup, bring in other resources and respond before things spiral out of control.
 
This is the critical tipping point of any coronial inquest. You can often determine the point of no return where the decision to continue inevitably led to the fatality and often it’s based upon poor thoughtless decision making, where there is plenty of evidence that it’s time to stop, regroup and rethink everything. Thankfully, the nauseating feeling on the mentioned trip, was telling me things are deteriorating and we need to change tactics. We waited until the main storm passed, went and grabbed the 4WD and then moved the group to an alternate campsite. Soon after setting up we had a fire going and everyone had something warm to drink.
 
Whilst it’s painful and distressing to read coronial inquests, it’s vitally important that you do as part of your ongoing risk management training and professional development. Understanding the experiences of others and the tragedies of the past can help us to make better decisions and ensure the safety of our groups into the future. It’s those lessons learned, that are powerful and stark reminders that risk management must be a living, breathing approach to running any program and not just a document which is dusted off when it’s subpoenaed by the coroner.
 
As part of your on going risk management, it’s well worth regularly reviewing and workshopping coronial reports with your team to ensure the situational awareness and those tipping points are at the forefront of everyone’s minds every time they’re out with a group to ensure everyone has a safe, challenging and enjoyable experience. 
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