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SW


STANDINGWAVES


CONFUSION HAS ITS COST river alchemy IN A CRISIS, MAKING SENSE IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH


Only a handful of times have I been to the edge—life threatening, soul searching, that-almost-killed-me events. The kind, to put


it mildly, I


never wish to experience again. What I remember about these brief, endless moments on the river is two things: first, the burning of water blasting through my sinus cavity and behind my eyeballs; and second, the confusion. The other half of my life is considerably more sedate. I’m an academic,


which means I read a lot, teach some, think about ideas and go to confer- ences. While sometimes I still walk away saying, “That almost killed me,” for the most part it is a safer place. Within this reading, teaching, ideas and conference circuit, there are a couple of gurus. One of them, a round, grey-haired sociologist, specializes in confusion. Sensemaking, actually. The opposite of confusion. Sensemaking is “the


process by which people give meaning to experience” he writes in his seminal work on risk management and error prevention. Karl Weick is fas- cinated with how individuals make sense of a situation. His specialty is how people deal with crisis. Back to the edge. It was a medium drop on the Upper Yough with a way-left boof line.


Lock the lip, boof…why am I not coming up? Where am I? How long did it take me to figure out I was getting surfed between the curtain and the


18 RAPID SPRING 2011


rock wall? Minutes? A second? Hard to tell. My confusion was dark, loud and all consuming. The field of risk management and accident investigation commonly re-


traces the decision-making process preceding and during a critical event. In this case, the decisions preceding my slip (being 16 inches off line) were sound. What should occur next—the decisions in the moment of cri- sis—either minimizes or escapes the situation. This is where Weick and sensemaking comes in, or doesn’t. Confusion precludes decision-making. Weick explains that how one


makes sense of a situation directly affects what gets decided. If sense- making does not catch up with a situation that is desperate and life threat- ening, then other critical decisions are not made. “The less adequate the sensemaking process directed at a crisis, the


more likely it is that the crisis will get out of control,” he concludes. The thing with theory is that it doesn’t help with the water blasting my


eyeballs and the rock wall where I want to put my paddle. In this case I didn’t make sense of where I was until I had already minimized the prob- lem to something I could deal with. I needed air. As I focused on solving my basic air problem, I eventually figured out what was going on. Weick can explain this, too. “There is a delicate trade-off between dan- gerous action which produces understanding, and safe inaction which


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