By Tom Parker

Tom Parker is one of the UK’s more active and experienced white water coaches. He is a Level 5 Coach, British Canoeing National Trainer and Rescue 3 International Instructor Trainer. To find out more about the courses he runs, head to www.tomparkercoaching.co.uk

The human factor

How flawed thinking leads to danger on the river “People voted for the Nazis and like Coldplay. You can’t trust people, Jez…”
Super Hans, Peep Show

Over the past 20 years of kayaking and coaching, I’ve noticed two consistent themes among white water kayakers; we consider safety to be an important subject and we consider ourselves to be reasonable people, used to making logical decisions in high-pressure situations. Safety and rescue training is widely available and well attended. In my experience, white water kayakers see the importance and value of these courses and are more than happy to attend a course. So far, so good?

Well, sort of. Training tends to focus on rescue (reaction to an incident) as opposed to safety (preventing or lessening the chance of an incident happening in the first place). I want to stress how important rescue skills are and that as white water kayakers we need to be proficient in them but we have to recognise that if we are having to use those skills, things have gone wrong. We are in a situation where at least one of our friends or clients is facing a real potential of injury at the very least. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could reasonably reduce the chances of that happening in the first place?

Firstly, we need to understand why incidents happen. Consider the various incidents you’ve been involved in on the river. Why did they happen? While you’re doing that, let’s delve a little way into how we as humans decide to do the things we do. We already know that we can make decisions consciously and logically, gathering relevant information and evaluating it before arriving at our course of action. But, honestly, how often do we actually employ this mode of thinking?

Rarely, because it’s a huge mental effort and we have to make a vast number of decisions each day. Using this approach all the time simply isn’t sustainable. The approach we use most of the time is subconscious and reliant on emotion and intuition. We have developed a prevalence for spotting or assuming patterns and developing stock responses accordingly, lessening the mental effort we need to exert.

‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’

Daniel Kahneman refers to these approaches as system one and system two in his seminal work ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’. Kahneman states that both systems run simultaneously, with system one providing suggestions that system two generally adopts with little or no modification. However, system one is flawed in that it has a number of in built biases that can serve to trip us up and we can find ourselves

Bearing this concept in mind, let’s consider the various incidents you’ve been involved with over the years. It’s likely that you’ve identified the cause to be a series of intuitive or emotional decisions based on the biases in our subconsciousness, despite a level of knowledge about the hazards faced. Incidents in our realm are rarely due to an ignorance of the hazards involved or an inability to manage them.

They happen despite an understanding of the hazards and how to manage them because the decisions we make are often emotional and biased. I understand that this can make for demoralising reading because it leads us to conclude that expertise is certainly not a guaranteed defence against poor decisions. The vast majority of incidents involving aircraft can be attributed to pilot error and pilots undergo incredibly thorough training.

There are avenues available to us manage our decision making and make our time on the river safer though. Whilst we can’t eradicate these biases, we can understand them and put in place strategies that limit their effects and that’s precisely what this series of articles aims to look at. We can’t stop incidents happening but we can stack the odds in our favour.

Join me next time, as we look more closely at some of the biases we hold and how they affect our decisions.