Leading Consenting Adults

Andy Singh

Guidelines for leading kayaking trips through PaddleAustralia are heavily orientated towards keeping novice paddlers safe. Among consenting, experienced expedition paddlers, the exercising of leadership goes well beyond any model or formualic approach.

Leading consenting adults can be understood through the current risk management guide ISO 31000: 2018. This approach provides for four phases including organisation, preparation, application and learning. There is a clear distinction between the managing (organisational) roles and the leading (application) roles. Please read Planning for Adaptive Expeditions for more discussion on the organising role. The float plan and risk management plan are key elements in establishing consent.

Exercising leadership serves two purposes on an expedition - a) keeping everyone safe, b) achieving our collective goal. Leadership remains legitimate if it continues to relate to these two points of consensual agreement. As leadership is legitimised around these values, our leadership and its accompanying authority, is easily transferrable within the group.

One role of leadership is performed in the role of the Scout. As the lead paddler, the Scout sets the pace of the fleet, looks for and communicates risk back to the group, initiates breaks through the day, and helps to identify the path which provides both safety and flow for the rest of the fleet to follow.

Another role of leadership is Tail End Charlie. They are the keeper of the defibrillator and the satellite phone - key elements in any emergency response. They are also the eyes of the fleet, the only paddler who can see the fleet as a whole. Communication between Tail End Charlie and the Scout via UHF radio is an important element in safe fleet management.

While the Scouts and Tail End Charlie are periodically chatting via UHF radios, a third radio is held by a paddler in the main group of paddlers (fleet leader) - this role feeds information from the Scout back and forth with the other paddlers, and likewise the Scout is updated on how paddlers are faring.

In the event of a high risk situation, a more command orientated leadership approach is adopted. If the risk is observed by the Scout, appropriate steps can be taken before the arrival of the main fleet. As the Scout has the best view of the risk, their leadership has legitimacy to move across into a command mode. Likewise if the risk appears in the middle of the fleet (unexpected capsize), then the Fleet Leader is well positioned to manage the situation. This may include instructing other paddlers to perform a rescue, while communicating with the Scout to stop and Tail End Charlie to come up. Command is an legitimate form of leadership when safety is time critical. Even when command is initiated, prepared emergency procedures allow other paddlers to exercise leadership in support of any rescue or recovery effort.

Over a multi-day expedition, the roles of Scout, Tail End Charlie and Fleet Leader will be moved around the group, based on interest and inclination.

Every group of paddlers have their own culture, and their own conformity. For experienced paddlers, the roles and functions of leadership can become implicit and inferred, across the duration of a journey. But leadership can also be exercised in the challenging of norms and group think. There is always room for improvement, so group culture always has to focus on improvement. It is never easy to challenge a norm, so sometimes the most important act of leadership can be the question you pose to your paddling friend - why are you doing what you are doing?

Within kayaking, there is a heavy emphasis on the formal float plan and risk management processes. While they are important, the time and space inherent within expeditions can results in their value diminishing over the length of a journey. Once on the expedition, the other elements of ISO 31000: 2018 become more important including Principles (value creation and protection) and Framework (leadership and commitment). These are the adaptive elements not easily articulated in a nice Word document template. These are capabilities not easily created in a pre-departure safety briefing. These are cultural capabilities built over time, refined through experience and reinforced through agreed values.

For the 2018 WOMDOMNOM event, a group of selected river guides applied these principles to lead 150 paddlers down a narrow and difficult Macquarie River. At the start of the event, the river was familiar, but very little was known about the paddlers and their equipment. But the guides knew each other, and through training knew each others skills and strengths, and over 5 days they adapted, learnt and lead the rest of the fleet to arrive safely in Narrandera. Many of these elements of adaptive risk management and consensual leadership have been successfully incorporated into other kayaking expeditions.

In the words of one paddler - "Its paddling without ego". Leadership without ego becomes a collective activity, a capability in excess of any single guide or trip leaders' rol