About SlabLab
At SlabLab our goal is to help the backcountry community have days that are both fun and safe. We do this by listening to and addressing challenges voiced by backcountry travelers. We believe that helping our community members navigate this dangerous environment starts with understanding their experience from their own perspective - as individuals and in teams. We conduct qualitative research with backcountry users and professionals, and offer the results of that work openly here for everyone to take, use and remix. We aim to help individuals and teams gain new perspectives and tools for their own practices. We also seek to partner with educators, forecasters, brands and other industry members to design solutions rooted in the needs of backcountry travelers.
Last year’s research on teamwork
In our
2022-23 report we identified that building a culture of candid communication is necessary to support safer touring in the backcountry. If we want to reduce behaviors that can expose us to excessive risk and cause harm to us and the backcountry environment, we need to deeply understand the human barriers to being candid. Many avalanche scientists have spent time identifying the range of Human Factors that get in the way of clear communication. But what we’ve noticed is that while many useful insights and reports are produced - converting this knowledge into practical, memorable steps to follow in backcountry scenarios feels lacking. In a slightly unusual turn of events, we borrowed some best practice from a totally separate context - that of sex education.
Why be inspired by sex ed?
There has been a huge drive to have people learn about and practice active, enthusiastic consent in recent years, in a bid to have safer (and better) sex. This work is inspiring because it gets to the heart of why we don’t always speak up candidly about our needs, as well as educating and empowering us to do so with practical tools and ideas. It’s a movement that has created change on the kind of cultural and intimate levels that is worth paying attention to for any behavioral scientist. With modern consent practices, individuals are more able to express their real desires in the heat of the moment, as well as crucially connect these practices to a wider cultural movement focused on their entitlement to seek pleasure and avoid harm.
We were also inspired by talking with Sara Boilen, Forensic Psychologist and researcher focused on Human Factors in Avalanche Terrain. She generously gave her feedback on our prototypes, and shared that she also uses conceptual frameworks drawn from consent and sex education (e.g. 'will/want/won't') when teaching backcountry tourers about relational dynamics and communication.
The Slablab team wanted to know whether encouraging skiers to borrow some of the principles from modern consent could support us to be more candid about our goals and boundaries in the backcountry too. When we say candor, we mean a level of transparency that verges on frankness. The backcountry requires us to commit to a higher level of honesty and communication than usual, in order to support each other, make safe decisions and have a great time.
About Jenny
For this project we partnered up with Design Researcher
Jenny Winfield. Jenny has a background in Psychology and Anthropology, and a strong passion for exploring in the outdoors. In her day job she supports people who have experienced sexual assault, and so ideas of good communication, risk taking, safety and consent are front of mind for her. She figured that while backcountry skiing and sex ed seem to be far apart, they deal with similar issues - people experiencing harm and even traumatic incidents due to uneven power dynamics and communication issues.
Inspired by the
Building Consentful Tech Zine by Una Lee and Dann Toliver, which applies principles of sexual consent to technology design, Jenny came to us with the idea of testing out some ideas from sex ed that might help backcountry skiers speak up more candidly about safety. On doing some early avalanche science reading, she noted that pretty much all of the human factors described - fallibility, motivation, peer influence, under/over estimation - are also at play in sexual relations.
What is active, enthusiastic consent?
Active, enthusiastic consent means looking for an enthusiastic yes from your partner(s), not just the absence of a no. Consent is sought before contact is made, and is reversible at any time. It recognises that non-verbal cues are as important to look for as verbal ones, as well as the fact that consent should be sought dynamically - whenever a situation changes.
Sex and backcountry skiing both present:
- A wicked learning environment. This means that the feedback we get is poor, misleading, or missing. In sex it may be hard get accurate feedback from your partners on their comfort level. In the backcountry you get little feedback from the snowpack, teammates, education or your process.
- An environment where even without intention people can be harmed or hurt, where avoidable trauma can and does take place
- A situation in which dominant partners often get their needs met and less confident ones do not speak up
- A situation in which a lot of consent is assumed or implied, there are huge gray areas - lack of clarity is rife
- Scenarios where people are encouraged to go beyond their limits to have a good time (not to be boring/play it safe)
What are the differences?
- There are many! One major one being that in sex, when one person puts another in harm's way - either deliberately or unintentionally, they may not be harmed themselves. They might not even be aware of it. In the backcountry - especially when we’re talking about triggering avalanches - when harm is caused by one party, they’re usually bringing danger upon themselves too. This is a distinct difference between the two scenarios.
- Another worth mentioning is that while consent in sex is reversible - you can in theory choose to stop and say no at any time, even after saying yes - this is a harder concept in the backcountry, where to reverse a decision made may not be so easy. If you’ve committed to a route and have started out on it, there may be risks involved in changing the plan.
About our researchAbout our research
SlabLab uses Human-Centered Design (HCD), a creative approach to problem solving. The research component of this work is known as Design Research, which is complimentary to but distinct from other forms of research. With roots in ethnography, Design Research often centers around qualitative interviews, mixed in with observation, data and prototype feedback as appropriate. This research is the first part of the Human-Centered Design process. From there we prototype and build with the goal of creating new solutions that stemmed directly from the needs and behaviors of the people we seek to help.
We consider "Design Thinking" to largely a synonym for Human-Centered Design.
What we did in this project
This year, in order to learn more deeply about relationships and communication styles between partners in the backcountry, we employed a research method focused on prototyping and live testing.
- We held interviews with 5 x carefully selected backcountry skiers of different levels of experience, with different attitudes to risk taking
- We created 13 prototype cards - 6 focused on phrases, and 7 focused on practices to try out. We hypothesized that if these were adopted by skiers, they could support people to have more approachable and candid conversations about planning trips and safety practices
- We asked our participants to meet with us, review the cards, select 2 to practice over the coming season, and then report back to us how that went
Based on the learnings later in the report, we've improved the cards and made them available online for more people to try out and improve - see the Backcountry Toolkit section.
We’ll also do further phases of research with people who are up for trying out the revised set of cards. If you want to sign up, email us at
hello@slablab.co.
The prompts
Each of the prototype cards represents one communication idea that we wanted to test with our participants. We created two kinds of cards: phrases and practices.
Phrases
Phrase cards have ideas for language choices, so actual ways of wording things. Each phrase card has a ‘from’ and ‘to’ in order to help participants understand what kind of communication we wanted to move away from, and explore what might feel good to move towards.
What we wanted to move away from
- Leading questions and pressure: ‘Are you OK with this plan?’, ‘Should we keep going?’ and ‘Wasn’t that great?’ are all questions that we have heard before in the backcountry and wanted to encourage people to move away from. That’s because they’re leading questions and don’t invite candid responses. They don’t make ‘no’ easy, and they don’t encourage discussion or nuance. From sex ed and other psychological research into safety and risk taking, we know that consent must be freely given and not assumed, implied or pressured.
- Harder to say phrases: We also included “I don’t want to do that’ as one to move away from, purely because we hypothesized that many people find this too hard to say to partners. (We actually found that this was not true!)
What we wanted to move towards
- Open questions: e.g. ‘What other options do we have for today?’, ‘What aspects worked?’ We hypothesized that these were likely to encourage discussion around comfort levels.
- Known phrases: e.g. ‘This feels like a red flag’. We hypothesized that having an existing, well understood phrase may make it easier to speak up
- Numbers: We wanted a phrase that enabled people to communicate comfort levels using numbers on a scale, rather than always turning to a description of feelings.
Practices
Practice cards represent some action or activity a team could try. We wanted to see whether participants would be willing to adopt, and would benefit from, a safety practice that they weren't already doing.
We deliberately put some practices in the mix that we all know we should be doing but from previous research we know people don’t do reliably (e.g. making a plan to debrief).
To those, we added some that were inspired by active enthusiastic consent - such as ‘No abstaining’, inspired by active consent being sought whenever a situation changes, or ‘Pre-load a decision’, which encourages people to consider the types of activities they’d be OK with taking part in, but outside the heat of the moment. This way they can figure out how they will make a consentful decision, and communicate that choice to partners.
Practice
Thumb check
Everytime a decision is made in the field everyone sticks out their thumb to indicate how they fell about it. Thumbs up means you are totally good with the plan and thumbs down meaning you are not.
Practice
Make a plan to debrief
During planning, tell your partner that you’d like to save at least 5 minutes at the end of the day to reflect on the trip
Practice
Pre-load a decision
When planning, anticipate one decision you’ll have to make in the field. Discuss ahead of time what observations or criteria you will use to decide.
Practice
Devil’s advocate
Take a moment at the end of your planning to all play devil’s advocate. Put anything that could go wrong on the table.
Practice
New person recap
Have the most junior member of the team recap the plan and point out any holes.
Practice
No abstaining
Everytime we make a decision in the field everyone says outloud how they feel about it
Practice
Beacon &buddy check
Add a human factor check in to your beacon check before skinning off. For example, “Anyone have anything they are thinking about that they want to raise for the group?”
Being candid can feel overly serious and clunky
There’s a social cost of instigating frank safety discussions - ruining the fun. Safety practices sound valuable in the abstract, but in reality they don’t always feel worth it. This is especially true when the level of risk is unclear.
What we learned
When we learn about the importance of safety in the backcountry, and practices that promote candid discussion, it all sounds like a no-brainer. We’re taught that planning and debriefing is essential, while speaking up and listening to others is foundational for great tours. We’re even warned that human factors are likely to influence us into making risky decisions. But somewhere along the way we drop these best practices. Why?
Recommendations
For EducatorS
Explain how to '
right size' planning, debriefs, and check ins to the conditions. You may only have time to demonstrate one size of each.
Don’t just explain the idea of things like listening to all voices. Have students practice implementing it in their own words.
For recreationalists
Change expectations. In the backcountry, unlike most social situations, sometimes awkwardness is called for.
During this research we learned that there is a pretty big gap between what we believe to be best practice, and what we do in reality when it comes to safety. We often heard participants describe things their ‘best selves’ were good at, but certainly moments and scenarios where their ‘not so good’ selves are the ones making the call: When they’re tired and want to get to the bar, when one too many people joined the tour without prior warning, when they noticed a risk but they kept quiet and hoped for the best.
In these moments, having candid discussions around safety does not always feel ‘worth it’ - and this reveals interesting insight around the perceived cost and value of safety practices. Namely, engaging in a frank discussion can feel heavy handed, and practices such as debriefing can feel clunky - a bad fit with the IRL needs of that moment. This is not all that surprising when you factor in that most people are not socialised to be candid with each other; there’s a social cost to being candid in any situation, not just the backcountry.
We need to rethink and right-size safety practices and protocols - not just in terms of how long they take, but also their tone and formality. Until we do, they will likely feel too serious and too cumbersome to follow, and be skipped, despite skiers knowing better.
What we heard
“You roll up to the trailhead, having a good time and it would switch into… all right, fun is over.”
“We like to soak into the environment and not talk. We’re into the spiritual side.”
“If it’s a full day tour, it may be appropriate (to do a communication practice), if it’s just a run down a side country run, it may not be as useful.”
Beacon + Buddy check
Add a human factor check-in to your standard beacon check before skinning off.
People liked the idea of “stacking” a new behavior (like checking in on human factors), to an existing behavior that is well established, (like a beacon check).
In interviews people said that they'd find it awkward to ask a more junior member to recap a plan and point out any perceived issues - this is better for a new joiner with the same level of expertise.
New person recap
Have the most junior member of the team recap the plan and point out any holes.
Updated practices
The practices we added to The Toolkit as a result of this research fell in two complimentary categories: building your ability to recognize feelings that were previously subconscious and, quite the opposite, tools that ensure you take time to notice things even if you don’t have those skills.
In interviews, people said that the best way to get team members to try a new safety practice was to talk about a time when it has already worked really well
In interviews, people said they were more likely to stick to a new practice if they'd given their team a heads up about it in advance and asked for their support in trying it out.
The link to sexual consent
- Being candid about what we want or like is not actually easy - many of us (particularly less dominant genders) will have been raised to go with the flow and please others. Being upfront has a perceived social cost: it may appear too weird, serious or formal.
- Many of us know on paper what safe sex is, but add in factors such as jealously or intoxication, and soon people are behaving IRL in ways far outside of what we know to be healthy or consensual
- Couples who practice active enthusiastic consent around sex have candid conversations to build trust and get to have MORE fun, not less. We can position safety practices as helping tourers go further and do more together - borrowing from sex ed.
Insight 2: It takes practiceWe underestimate the skill and practice that it takes to be candid
Being candid doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Adapting to a new style of communicating is a skill that takes practice, but we don't always give ourselves the space to be learners.
What we learned
Recommendations
Try a new perspective: Soft skills take time and practice, just like hard skills. We can’t just hear the idea and do it.
Normalize practicing by modeling it - ‘Hey, at the moment I’m working on X. Would you give me feedback on that after the tour?’
We naturally expect that it can take years to learn to ski or ride, or acquire outdoor skills like snowpack evaluation and navigation. We also expect that no matter how many times and ways a ski instructor tells us to “get our weight forward” it’s a process to internalize what that actually feels like and learn to do it across different conditions.
Interpersonal skills (e.g. the way we talk to each other) also require practicing and internalizing, but we sometimes assume that they’re easier to adopt. We’re more likely to expect that if we believe a practice is valuable, we can easily start using it as soon as we hear it.
Instead, our participants told us that it wasn’t so easy to change their communication habits: first of all they needed to bring their team mates into the experiment to give the change some context. Then, they wanted to tweak the cards to make them their own, and third, they needed lots of practice.
Explaining to team members why they wanted to try the cards was very effective in creating an opening for discussion about safety on the team, and often participants used past experiences to frame why this was. In fact, the cards that resonated most were those where participants had a strong previous experience of where the idea would have helped.
With new practices that were adopted successfully by our participants, we also observed a process of “making it theirs” start when they first considered the cards and progress as they used them with their team. They would suggest versions of the cards using their own words, often making the language snappier or more lighthearted - ultimately more 'them'.
Once teams achieve a shared understanding of the practice, they could also start to use a shorthand for it. Partners who went on multiple tours continued to make their practice feel shorter and faster - in essence, easier to reach for.
What we heard
Practices get efficient over time
"Instead of saying a long sentence we had it down to a method where we’d say 10? 10. And we’d keep going. There was a sketchy spot and he said 5, I said 5, and we stopped and talked about it. It was really cool, very flowy"
Participants adjust language as needed
“Instead of ‘what part of this plan gives you pause', on my recent tour I said 'Is there anything that's tingling your spidey senses'?
“What about... “Should we keep going on the route we had agreed upon, or should we choose an alternative?”
Participants told us that when using this card on a tour, after a few go's they had it down to just a number, “ten”, “ten”, “eight”. It became a more efficient way to communicate their comfort levels and identify when a longer conversation was needed.
This was one participants routinely wanted to re-write in their own language. It’s key to evolve language and practices to work for you.
Updated practices
When evolving these sayings and practices in The Toolkit to reflect this insight, we wanted to acknowledge that they need time to sink in and normalise just like any hard skill. A big part of that is simply setting that expectation with your team.
In interviews, people said that the best way to get team members to try a new safety practice was to talk about a time when it has already worked really well
We hear things like “listen to all voices” it seems like we have it down. In reality it takes multiple tries to adapt to a new practice, and even more to get really good at it when the heat is on.
The link to sexual consent
- Having candid conversations about sex, consent, intimacy and relationships doesn’t come naturally to everyone. People who do practice this type of communication know that it’s something that takes commitment and practice.
- Saying words out loud about a discomfort you’re feeling is often too hard to do if you’ve literally never voiced those words before. The effect is magnified if you are scared for your life or under the influence of substances.
- Giving people space to ask about consent in their own words, rather than prescribing a rigid dialogue is much more likely to work - with the caveat that YES and NO, are clear and work well too.
Insight 3: IntuitionSafety concerns don’t always rise to the level of conscious thought
There’s a sizeable gap between a tourer sensing in their body that something is ‘off’ - and articulating that concern confidently to partners.
What we learned
Recommendations
For recreationalists
While you’re still building self-awareness, find moments that remind you to check in on your comfort level. For example, piggy back on water and snack breaks.
Observe your partners. Body language or indirect asks (like ‘You go first’) may be clues.
Remember that your intuition can be wrong too - it’s not something to automatically trust.
Last year we reported that while most backcountry travelers state that they will always speak up when there is a clear safety issue, in practice it’s often ambiguous whether you’ve crossed the threshold into “safety issue”.
This year, we probed more deeply around this idea of ambiguity and sensing. We found that a conscious evaluation or observation about whether your situation is unsafe (and therefore worth bringing up) is not always available to us in the backcountry; we may need help first in acknowledging our felt sense of risk in the body.
Looking back in hindsight on decisions they regret, or situations that were unsafe but not explicitly so, participants recall having a “spidey sense” or intuition about it; something felt subtly off. They had a sense of hesitation, but it didn’t rise to the level of conscious thought. They can recall this feeling, but at the time, executive function didn’t kick in to further examine the source of their unease, let alone have them vocalise it.
Worse still, in these moments, participants described making changes in their body language or choices that they thought their partner might pick up on - but these signals were too subtle to land.
We believe this idea of becoming self-aware of intuitive, felt unease is a step that precedes deciding whether something warrants candid communication. People need more support to pay attention to these signals and curiously explore them, as a precursor to sharing. After all, it’s hard to be candid when you’re not even sure whether there’s a pressing risk to your safety.
Exercises that encourage regular, lightweight evaluation of one’s feelings showed promise in helping tourers become more aware of their intuition (spidey senses) and share any changes in comfort levels out loud.
For example, being asked simply for a periodic gut check on comfort levels, on a scale of 1-10; Any deviation from 10 prompts the speaker and team to enquire about what gave rise to that number.
We also saw some promise with exercises that prime the team to look out for unease (agreeing ahead of time to have a low bar for sharing unease (even if its unexplained), sharing what uneasiness looks like for them personally in advance, or agreeing that there will be a debrief moment after).
What we heard
It worried me enough, that I told him, ‘why don't you go first? I’ll follow'. I think I had an assumption because we ski together, my saying 'you should go first' was a major sign that I have concerns. I was probably relying too much on subtext rather than text.
“He did notice a slight crack in the snow, which is a red flag. Very small. If we did our normal day he wouldn't have brought it up again… he would have forgotten that crack if we hadn't debriefed.”
Thumb check
Everytime a decision is made in the field everyone sticks out their thumb to indicate how they feel about it.
Some participants appreciate the practices that build in moments to check in with yourself. A thumb check is a nice non-verbal alternative to always having to chime in.
When people did debrief it routinely brought up things they thought would have been more helpful to say in the field, and things that would have otherwise been forgotten.
Make a plan to debrief
During planning, tell your partner that you’d like to save at least 5 minutes at the end of the day to reflect on the trip.
Updated practices
The practices we added to The Toolkit as a result of this research fell in two complimentary categories: building your ability to recognize feelings that were previously subconscious and, quite the opposite, tools that ensure you take time to notice things even if you don’t have those skills.
Becoming more aware of your spidey sense is a learnable skill. One way to practice is to periodically think about your body. Are you tense, clenching teeth, are there butterflies? Maybe there's something worth a little conscious thought.
We set calendar alerts to pop up, we leave our keys and wallet by the door. Training your brain to recognize something that happens regularly on a tour acts as a build in alert system. We can be taking a moment more regularly to body scan for unease and take a moment to assess plans.
The link to sexual consent
- A felt sense of unease will often alert individuals to danger in intimate situations, especially if situations or requests change quickly. This is why dynamic consent is so vital - to stay in tune with comfort levels rather than considering consent ‘one and done’.
ConclusionsIn conclusion
It was fun to borrow insight from the world of sex ed and consent and bring it into the backcountry context. Thinking about how people use better communication to avoid traumatic incidents in a parallel world helped us to see how many of our safety challenges are human, not just tied to our backcountry environment. We also imagine that when partners open up about one topic, they might try speaking more candidly on other topics too, and we hope to grow people’s tendency to talk - whether that’s about the snow pack, their mental health or whatever else is going on for them.
Before this project we knew that candid communication is tough in the backcountry. In our research, inspired by and using the tools of active consent, we learned about why this is: being frank with team mates around risk can feel unnatural, it can have a social cost, and it takes practice and adapting to. Moreover, awareness of danger may only prickle in the body as a spidey sense, and not rise to the conscious level of thought which precedes candid expression.
Given these learnings, there is a lot we can do to support people in developing their candid communication muscles. Right sizing safety practices is something we’ve been interested in for a while, and we’re going to take this to the next level by providing people with lots of ideas of how to right size practices according to time, formality, mood, scenario and more.
We know that to really adopt these practices, people need to make them their own, and so we’ve made our card library available in the Teamwork Toolkit for anyone to try out. Please check out the toolkit, try some cards, and feedback so that we grow our capacity and learn from each other.
Finally, honouring our intuition in the backcountry and helping folks move through the phases from ‘spidey sense’ to frank discussion is something we want to work on with more partners. This might look like more psychological research, workshops and prototyping mindfulness practices on tours. If you’re interested, reach out to us slablab.co
Thanks for reading and stay safe!
