In January 2003, snow conditions north of Revelstoke, British Columbia, were ripe for avalanche. Fall rain had hardened to a crust on top of a layer of snow, and this crust was subsequently covered by more snow, creating deep instability in the snowpack.
Ken Wylie was an apprentice ski guide that season, working toward his certification — the final step to becoming an International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations certified mountain guide. He knew the snow conditions that winter were unstable. He was nervous about them. He admits he was also afraid of contradicting the certified guide he was apprenticing under, causing him to not speak up or take firm action about his concerns.
Then, on Jan. 20, 2003, an avalanche struck the 21-member group Wylie was helping lead, burying 13 of them, including Wylie. He was rescued, mostly unharmed, 45 minutes later. In the end, however, seven members of the group were buried too long and died of asphyxiation.
The experience profoundly changed Wylie. Weighted with guilt, he struggled to understand what really took place in him internally that led to the fatalities — and wanted to know if a better understanding of human factors could have prevented such a tragedy. He became a student of psychology, diving deep into human factors and their effects on decision-making. He also gave many talks about his experience to the mountain guiding community. Then an audience member question flipped a switch in his mind.
“A year after the tragic event, I was presenting to a group of avalanche professionals when someone in the back of the room said: ‘It was really obvious that you had a dangerous snowpack, and the avalanche danger rating was a “considerable” — so what were you doing there with 21 people on the same slope at the same time?,’ ” Wylie said. “It was a difficult question. I didn’t know how to answer it, because the answer was way bigger than I had words for at the time.”
A Step Deeper into Human Factors
Aviation human factors 101 teaches us to recognize the human factors that can lead to accidents. Most aviation professionals can easily recall an accident involving someone’s decision not to speak up or not to push it when their concerns were not heard. On the surface, Wylie’s situation was textbook in that way. He knew it was not safe, but he didn’t feel comfortable pushing it with the professional Swiss guide leading the ski tour, who was set on delivering an amazing experience for the group.
The audience member’s question made Wylie dive deeper into the “why,” and in doing so he began to see a new layer in human factors: mindset.
“I’ve since begun to understand the power of our mindset, which has a profound effect on the decisions we make and the outcome,” he explained to Vertical. “Fear is good in some ways — it warns us when there is danger — but if we let fear take over, we are no longer able to make high level choices. A lack of fear, though, makes us complacent, which can be just as dangerous. However, if I can recognize I am showing up in fear, my mindset, I can access courage, the opposite of fear. If I was showing up in fear, and now I’m showing up in a more courageous mindset, I’ve elevated my response to the situation.”
In Wylie’s case, the courage would have been used to stand up to the lead guide instead of buckling to the fear of the guide’s anger over being contradicted or questioned, letting down the clients, or not advancing his career. He could have refused to go, suggested a different route, or shared his deep concern with the clients to join him in not going, he reflected.
“If we are conscious of how we’re showing up, we can then choose a different response,” he said. “If we can do that, then we’re going to make better decisions. I was operating in fear that day in 2003. I was in the ‘flight’ part of fight or flight because I didn’t perceive that I had a choice to change the day’s skiing objective. It’s really critical that we perceive that we always have a choice. I could have chosen courage — courage to stand up, speak out, and change the situation.”
Archetypes
With this new clarity, Wylie began to notice a pattern in accidents across several industries. Key capacities were being left behind when decisions were made, sometimes getting us in trouble. He explains this by highlighting how we typically approach situations with a very left-brain focus and leave out the valuable right-brain aspects that are important idecision-making, such as listening, nurturing, caring, and creativity. He boiled these down into specific archetypes, or models of personality that embody specific thoughts and behaviors.
Wylie identified 16 archetypes of disaster and safety. He separated them into two opposing groups he refers to as ‘limiting’ and ‘expansive’, and then detailed mindsets associated with each. By charting these archetypes and their mindsets, he developed a map to both help people understand the mindset they were arriving with, and the journey to a more open mindset — the balance between two opposing archetypes — that can help avoid potentially poor decisions.
Wylie’s opposing archetypes are addict/alchemist, victim/hero, hermit/everyman, wallflower/explorer, narcissist/caregiver, player/sage, charlatan/visionary, and saboteur/monk. Each of these archetypes are associated with specific mindsets (see below). For instance, the victim is constrained by fear and faint-heartedness while the hero embodies courage. By understanding what you’re afraid of and rising above it — but not so much that you disregard the original concern — you find balance for a more holistic decision-making process, Wylie argues.
People can display traits of any of these archetypes, and even more than one, depending on the situation. He argues that having mindsets completely toward one side or the other can limit decision-making. Only by recognizing how they show up, then finding a balance between them, is someone in a position to make the best decisions. Wylie refers to the area of balance as being wholly humane in our mindsets.
Learning to be Human(e)
With an understanding of what was at play within human factors and a road map to help people recognize how they’re responding to adverse situations so they can learn and grow, Wylie needed a way to teach it. He created Archetypal, a company that provides trainings and retreats using group participation scenarios based around well-known accidents.
After introducing and explaining the archetypes and mindsets, Wylie breaks the audience into groups to act out a key decision-making event in an accident. The groups use Archetypal’s deck of cards that break out the mindsets in each archetype, including questions to ask to determine the mindsets of the people involved in the event and how they could have shifted that mindset.
One such scenario is the Space Shuttle Challenger accident and the decision not to scrub the flight. The day before the launch, NASA and the shuttle’s solid rocket booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol had a conference call to discuss the safety of launching in freezing temperatures. Morton Thiokol engineers argued the O-rings were susceptible to erosion and failure in cold temperatures and recommended postponing the launch. NASA managers pressured the manufacturer to reconsider. After an off-the-record conference, Morton Thiokol reversed its recommendation. The Challenger exploded due to O-ring failure the next morning after launch.
Wylie’s groups received pages of the transcript from the call with information about each of the people who participated in the fateful conference call and what was said. They are tasked with reviewing the scenario and discussing the decision-making processes as well as the role fear, courage, and denial played in the call. They also look at the role of social dynamics and the impact of organizational culture on decision-making.
Lively discussions take place in the workshops, with Wylie calling on individuals to share what they see happening in the scenario and how that relates to their own experiences. Pressure, denial, and fear were glaringly obvious. In the Challenger scenario, engineers who exhibited courage seemed to be outweighed or pressed into no longer speaking up. It seems so obvious.
“When I teach the archetypal model, it opens a lot of eyes,” Wylie said of his training sessions. “On the shadow side, we feel pressure that takes us into a go/no-go decision with no choice. When we bring our values into the model, the luminant side, we suddenly have options, so training ourselves to feel the difference between those two elements is the key.”
Wylie shares his own experience and ties it into his example scenarios, whether it’s the Challenger, Deep Water Horizon, Chernobyl, or any number of commercial aviation accidents he uses as examples.
“On that mountain, I remember feeling the situation just pressing on me, like I was in a vice, and I perceived that I had no choice,” he explained during one of his sessions. “All I needed to do was say was ‘I’m not going to participate in this.’ It was that simple. One of my clients behind me said he didn’t like the situation, and I agreed, but I went forward because I perceived that I had no choice. What was really unfair is that he died. We have thousands of years of evolution and these bodies that are incredibly sensitive, yet we’ve trained ourselves that our emotions don’t have meaning or bearing. . . . We don’t necessarily want our emotions to control us, but we need to be able to notice them and use them and have awareness of our mindset in our decision-making if we want to avoid decisions that lead to disaster.”
Wylie ends his sessions by illustrating for participants how they can use the model in everyday life, with everyday decisions. They practice recognizing what they bring to a situation, how it can be more balanced, and making decisions based off that.
He uses the example of breaking his partner’s favorite mug. While his gut reaction is to deny it and be deceptive, that could plant a seed in the relationship that will lead to distrust and chaos. Pointing to the mindsets in his model, he highlights how owning up to the mistake and apologizing leans more toward truth and trust.
“I’ve done something silly, and I need to own it,” he said. “I realize this is going to be uncomfortable, but it’s me accessing my humanity and honoring the fact that I’m human. I make mistakes, and so fundamentally, what happens is, I tell her I’ve broken her favorite coffee cup, and I’m really sorry. The upshot is we’ve built trust. That’s an everyday example of how we can do that with really small things. If we practice with really small things, when the big events happen, we know the process. We’ve practiced it. It comes more naturally, and we can make better decisions.”
To learn more about Archetypal and access resources on Wylie’s model, visit archetypal.ca.