Our Climbing, Backpacking, or Trekking Expedition isn't Over Until We Do This Retrospective

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Typically, no one likes being told what to do. If you are accomplished in the area of discussion - say, a soccer player with thirty years of experience - you likely would chafe at a coach say, you need to take the ball ball using the inside of your foot rather than the outside.” You know this already. But if you were a beginner, and you’ve been trapping the ball with the outside of your foot and it’s been working for you, suddenly being told to change might also be grating.

Let’s try this deliver to the beginner, instead: “When you tap the ball with the outside of your foot, you limit the directions you can take the ball with your next touch because the ball is on one side of your body. But if you trap the ball with the inside of your foot, the ball is in the middle of your stance, and it is easier to go any direction with your next touch. That makes you harder to defend.”

The former is a direction. Do this. The later is an invitation into a broader perspective, the “why” behind the coaching becomes evident. That treats the person being coached as someone capable of seeing the bigger picture, and even invites them into a broader conversation, rather than being treated as an automaton who should just follow orders.

Or, we could get even better with this: “Why do you think it is usually better to trap the ball with the inside of your foot?” This is beyond an invitation to a conversation, it actually is a conversation.

But a funny thing happens in some high-consequence environments. Often times beginners will simply defer to more experienced people, granting those more experienced individuals something call “the expert halo.” Avalanche accident studies have actually found that come accidents could be avoided if whole groups didn’t just defer to people with more (or who are perceived to have more) experience. This limits the number of perceptions that are brought to bear on a decision and even experts sometimes miss something that other people in a group managed to perceive.

For both reasons, to avoid expert halo traps and to make beginners feel like they are respected members of a team, it is go to solicit feedback and “invite into a conversation” the perspectives of everyone in an adventure group. It also has the residual effect of building a bond of trust that can carry forward to future trips together.

One of the most self-evident but frequently under-utilized opportunities for soliciting adventure teammates into a conversation is the “retrospective.” What did we learn from the trip we just took together? There are lots of ways to do this, and while the video presents one method, I am not saying this is the only (or even the best) method. What I will say, though, is that structuring the conversation in some way, rather than just letting it free flow is probably a good thing. If we have some way of categorizing the different aspects of a big adventure trip, than we are more likely to have at least considered the areas for improvement in all those different aspects. If we simply free flow the conversation, we might skip over some area that was important but just not important enough to be what was on everyone’s top of mind.

So, take a look and see what a “structured facilitation” approach might be for an expedition retrospective. It might not be the way you want to do it, but it might inspire you to use some method so that you can take advantage of these ready-made opportunities to coalesce as a team by having a conversation for which everyone’s perspective is invited.