DEVIL IN THE DETAILS


I GOT A GOOD SCARE last fall on a late Oc- tober multi-day trip when a loaded oar


flipped and not everyone came out from un- derneath it. Flipping a loaded oar rig is always bad


news—something to be avoided at all cost. Once upside down, they become giant, heavy, out-of-control entrapment devices. So it was with this one. I spent several years river guiding in the


desert southwest, and days off were all about rock climbing. Big walls were my thing then— long, technical, gear-intensive and sometimes multi-day tests on a massive cliff face. I wasn’t athletic enough to climb the good


sport routes, and there was something more appealing about the slow, methodical pace of aid climbing. A single pitch can take hours—hours of in-


tense concentration and focus on the minute details. Aid climbing requires every movement to be planned, precise and methodical. Big wall climbing narrows the universe down to


“Show me a person who cannot bother to do little things, and I’ll show you a person who cannot be trusted to do big things.”


just gravity, arm’s-reach imperfections in the rock face, your belay partner and whatever goes on in your head. The saying “don’t sweat the small stuff” doesn’t apply to big wall climb- ing. Nor to running stiff whitewater in oar rigs. Social psychologists tell us certain people


are better at details than others. It’s account- ed for in our personality traits, which science has narrowed down to the five-factor model of personality. As the anchor of the ‘big five’ traits, conscientiousness measures one’s ten- dency towards detail, organization and dili- gence. (The other factors are agreeableness, neuroticism, openness and extraversion). There are reams of research on this, and it all points towards conscientiousness as a reliable predictor of almost any form of human per- formance—more predictive than any other of the big five traits. The more details matter to an activity, the more predictive conscientious- ness is. I often pull out this quote when teach- ing my outdoor students: “Show me a person who cannot bother to do little things, and I’ll show you a person who cannot be trusted to do big things.” Aspects of conscientiousness are learned skills—one can improve their ability to take


WHY YOU SHOULD ALWAYS SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF rig


care of details. Here I hope I am stat- ing the obvious: safety critical activities like rock climbing and running oar rigs are detail intensive. This brings us back to the upside down


entrapment device, the one out from under which too few helmets emerged. Standing on the river left shore, I watched


the 15-foot oar rig line up for the steep, shallow rapid. We’d taken our time setting up the run perfectly, taking care of all the potential details and settling on the most conservative plan given our options. The first raft patiently drifted through


the shallow entry and locked into the crux slot just a raft-width wide. The second raft scrubbed a rock on entry and turned a lit- tle sideways. Not ideal. Then it did one of those slow slide-up-the-edge-of-the-slot- and-tip-over moves—not unexpected, but when one helmet did not emerge it was rescue 911 time. Two guides were in the water with their


hands on the boat in a flash, slowing it down and getting it out of the current. I bashed my way through the bush to get down- stream where we corralled the raft to shore. Thirty seconds had passed. Just as we got control of it, the trapped guide-in-training emerged, knife in hand, having successfully cut himself free. Too close for comfort. The bow line, which in this case was a


clipped throwbag, had trailed out after the flip even though the bag itself stayed in place. The rope found its way around the passenger’s ankle. A tightly coiled bow line or slip-knotted


throwbag is just one of a hundred details it takes to put together an efficient oar rig. Getting behind the oars and adding mov- ing water introduces hundreds more. Add some clients and multiply the details by a thousand. How does one decide which details matter


and which ones are less important? The an- swer is simple: they all matter. In this white- water gig, whether rigging a half-ton oar rig or just wedging your feet into a playboat, every little detail matters. Our safety-critical environment means that the detail over- looked or left undone may be the one that makes all the difference.


Jeff Jackson is a professor with Algonquin College’s Outdoor Adventure guide train- ing diploma and is the co-author of Man- aging Risk: Systems Planning for Outdoor Adventure Programs.


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