22WRMC

This pre-conference workshop is full.  Please do not add to your schedule.

Accidents in outdoor and adventure programs are caused by multiple interacting, and contributory factors. This workshop will provide you with the capability, principles and tools to perform system-wide analyses in your own organisation. The Accimap method (Rasmussen, 1997) has been used to analyse accidents in multiple domains including aviation, patient safety, outdoor education, terrorism, and marine safety. You’ll leave with a detailed understanding of how to plan, conduct and communicate your findings to a range of organisational audiences.

When you only have a few days in the field with students, it’s crucial to establish an inclusive learning environment to deliver material and manage risk effectively. This presentation will cover best practices for creating effective, inclusive lesson plans that meet learners’ needs and contribute to better risk management throughout a program. Participants will finish the session with a template and concrete strategies for building productive learning environments in the classroom and the field.

Come learn from a case study involving a sexual misconduct allegation and how a series of events can rapidly put your organization in a critical situation. The lessons learned from this case study will help prepare your own organization for conscientious cross gender interactions, creating respectful relationships with minors and what to do if those boundaries are broken, minors are made to feel uncomfortable, and allegations are filed.

Reflecting your organization's value and concern during a crisis and in the aftermath is a key to serving affected participants, staff, and their families, who are struggling to cope. Learn how to create a response that will directly aid affected staff and participants in and out of the field and work with families as they cope with uncertainty. This workshop will provide attendees with practical experience and guidelines to support staff in the field, train family liaisons, and how to define organizational norms that will support participants, staff, and families during and after an incident.

Communicating after a bad event – with family members, your staff, your stakeholders and the general public – is essential. You need to assist those impacted and manage the story in conventional and social media. Done properly, you can get the bad news over with quickly. Done poorly, however, you’ll anger survivors, their families and the public – setting yourself up for costly litigation and poor reputation. This session will help you understand how to do things correctly.

Sometimes the best outcome is for a participant to go home before the program is over. Setting your program and its participants up for success means preparing to support both attendance and early departure. This presentation will look at strategies and tools to reduce unnecessary departures as well as identify and ease necessary departures.

What do we identify as the Strategy “high road”? Strategy is thoroughly considered and evaluated to promote the best outcomes and the fewest disruptions to health and wellbeing while furthering the goals of the expedition. Culture relies on previous experience, transference of knowledge from lead scientists and senior field staff to upcoming researchers, and may not take into account the perspective of Steve Smith’s “Safety Differently” bell curve. How do we shift the culture to encompass a wider perspective that includes human factors, DEI, and lessons learned? We don’t have all of the answers but we would love it if you joined the discussion.

Should we hire our workers as 1099 independent contractors or W2 employees? Does the Biden Administration's new minimum wage rule apply to us? What does the law say about incorporating JEDI considerations into our hiring practices? This presentation will discuss each of these questions by summarizing some of the main legal and practical points outdoor industry organizations can consider to both improve relations with their workers and reduce the risk of employment law issues.

Overview:
In our first risk-taking exercise, participants will be encouraged to turn off their electronic devices for the duration of the workshop. For those interested in taking this risk a step further, we will invite you to separate yourself from your devices by leaving them in a safekeeping box near the door

Capacity for compassionate risk taking is an outcome of effective adventure education. The culture of risk aversion has been adversely affecting quality of outdoor experiences. Fear of liability in its many forms moves outdoor industry away from Free Living in Nature towards prescribed and often transactional experiences of shorter duration and limited scope. In the past two years, the reduction approach to risk taking has caused substantial degradation of social well-being. To achieve social transformation and reverse the climate change we need to raise generations of compassionate and altruistic risk-takers and the adventure education has a unique role to play!

During this interactive workshop participants will examine the benefits of healthy risk-taking approach to life and education, create a list of personal and institutional healthy risk-taking habits, develop methods for holding exciting briefings with stakeholders aimed at replacing the irrational fear with excitement for adventure and leave inspired to change the institutional culture of fear.