Embracing Responsibility vs. Placing Blame
A worthy read that touches on the foundations of how we respond to error. This discussion could not possibly be more relevant to avalanche safety. So, let's have it.
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Molly Absolon
POSTED: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2016 4:30 AM
Mountainside / By Molly Absolon | 0 comments
"Hours after a Dec. 15 avalanche closed Teton Pass and forced a car off the road my Facebook feed had come alive with comments about the situation. A breaking news report from the News&Guide said that authorities suspected a skier had triggered the slide and the response on the internet was harsh. People called for blood. Someone should pay, they wrote. Someone had been stupid, reckless or thoughtless, they said. Someone had jeopardized skiing on Teton Pass for everyone, they asserted.
I hoped the accusations were false and wondered how we would ever know. If someone had in fact triggered the slide, why would he or she come forward in the face of the storm of hatred and anger that was raging in cyberspace? Why would anyone volunteer to confront such condemnation when it would be easier to say nothing until the clouds passed by?
I don’t know if there was a culprit in the Teton Pass avalanche situation. As has been reported in the News&Guide, sheriff’s investigators determined they did not have enough evidence to warrant criminal charges. Apparently a number of people were interviewed and rumors abound about what actually happened out there that evening, but no one is coming forward to accept responsibility.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us. According to a 2015 report by Alan Jones and Bruce Jamieson entitled “The Effects of Under-Reporting on Non-Fatal Involvements in Snow Avalanches on Vulnerability,” 90 percent of nonfatal avalanche incidents are not reported. Ninety percent. That means most of the people out there who’ve triggered or been caught in a slide aren’t telling anyone about their experience.
Why don’t people report the avalanches they’re involved in? My guess is that it’s largely because they are ashamed, embarrassed or afraid of the public condemnation that will follow, and I don’t blame them. If the comments that floated around after the Twin Slides avalanche indicate the type of response you can expect to receive if you speak up, it’s not hard to understand why someone might prefer to keep quiet.
Social media makes it all too easy for us to sit back and call people names. Public shaming is nothing new of course. History is full of examples: pillories, stocks, tar and feathering, public whippings, etc., were all ways to use humiliation and embarrassment to control behavior. In modern times we’ve done away with these primitive tools. Now it seems as if we’ve replaced them with the internet. In hours a story can go viral and trigger hundreds of vicious comments about a person. Even if the story is later proven to be false or inaccurate, the damage is often done.
I do not know if anyone knows whether the Dec. 15 slide was skier triggered. I guess there was some basis for that accusation, although it may just be an assumption based on the number of skiers and boarders who regularly use the area.
Statistically you could argue those numbers alone point the finger at a human-caused slide. But it was also dumping snow and blowing hard that evening. Mother Nature could just as easily have triggered that slide. Without a smoking gun, I don’t think it’s fair or safe to jump to conclusions about what caused this particular slide. And that’s not really my point.
My point is that public shaming silences us. We are afraid to speak up for fear of the consequences. But how can we learn from each other if we aren’t open and honest about our mistakes? How can we understand avalanches if 90 percent of them go unreported because people fear repercussions if they come forward?
Most outdoor education and guide services keep close track of their accident and near-miss statistics to guide their risk management. The underlying belief is that the cause of an incident should not be dismissed as simply a personal error or stupidity that can be solved by firing whoever was involved. Rather the idea is that the individual or individuals implicated are part of the organization’s system. They were trained by the organization and, unless there was a blatant disregard for procedure or negligence, an accident points more to shortcomings in the training than in the individual.
Shifting the idea of blame away from one person helps diffuse some of the anger and shame associated with a mistake. It allows people to learn from the situation and find the holes in their education that make them vulnerable to such errors.
Of course, that’s assuming the accident was an error and not negligence. There’s a big difference between the two. Intentionally testing an avalanche slope above a crowded highway to see if it is safe to ski is a reckless act and deserves to be investigated for possible criminal wrongdoing. On the other hand, accidentally triggering a slide from the Mount Glory boot track raises questions about our assumptions of safe zones and good route finding rather than negligence. But how are we ever going to be able to explore the difference if no one is willing to speak up?
Drew Hardesty, a longtime forecaster with the Utah Avalanche Center and a Grand Teton National Park climbing ranger, has been exploring the effect of shame on our behavior, particularly with regard to risk. He recently shared with me an article he wrote on the topic. In it he says, “For most of us, connection — being part of the fabric of the community — is important. We yearn for the trust and respect of our backcountry partners, friends … even loved ones. And this is central — even foundational — to how we see ourselves and, dare I say, where we fit and stack up in the community. Reputations take a lifetime to develop and only a few minutes to destroy.”
Hardesty goes on to talk about the work of Brene Brown, a University of Houston professor who has gained fame from her TED talks on shame and vulnerability. Brown talks about how fear of shame and vulnerability hold us back, stifle our creativity and innovation and prevent change. She goes on to explore how deeply ingrained shame is in our culture and how difficult it is for us to break down its barriers to true learning. The antidote, she says, is empathy.
Social media leaves little room for empathy, however. Studies have shown that in the absence of face-to-face contact, humans are more willing to be cruel, harsh and judgmental. It’s easy to call someone names with your fingers on the keyboard, harder when you have to look into his or her eyes and say the words out loud.
Empathy demands that we put ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we jump to any conclusions about their actions. Empathy requires listening even when we think we know the answers.
And yet, not all mistakes are honest, simple errors. Some mistakes do deserve punishment.
If we knew that the avalanche in Twin Slides was triggered by someone skiing the path on a day of high hazard despite the fact that hundreds of cars were passing below, that seems like enough cause for prosecution.
As Rich Mrazik, a Salt Lake City litigator and backcountry skier, wrote in the February 2013 Avalanche Review: “The law allows you to be as rad as you want to be as long as you do not cause injury to people minding their own business.”
So we are faced with a conundrum. To learn from our mistakes, we have to be willing to share them and probe into the root causes. We have to separate the individual from the act and try to listen with empathy. We have to recognize that failure is the incubator for growth and change and that only by examining our failures can we improve.
But we also have to realize that in a crowded world we cannot disregard the fact that we are not alone out there. If our decisions hurt innocent bystanders, we need to accept the consequences."
