If May was an expedition leader, we’d all be dead on a mountain

I spent much of my early working life as an expedition leader, taking people up mountains and down rivers. It was tremendous fun, but also a lot of hard work and life changing responsibility. Taking people to see new places, and seeing the smile of their faces when they had reached their goal was hugely rewarding. However to ensure we reached these goals took a lot of planning, hard work, and leadership.

You see, in my clients eyes, my job was to get them to where they wanted to go, and this is what they were paying my for. They wanted to reach a definitive destination. Whether that was the top of a rock climb, a mountain, or over a hundred miles away through wilderness and bogs, my clients wanted to get there, and my job was to get them there. To me though, my job was to keep them safe. Yes I wanted them to reach their goal, but always my job was to make the best decisions to keep people safe.

Before every expedition I would plan extensively. I would plan the equipment, food, logistics. I would check the weather, water levels, no detail left to chance. I would also plan the route we were taking to our destination, but I would also plan multiple contingencies just in case. But with any expedition, any complex problem which involves multiple conditions and people, planning only goes so far.

When my clients arrived for the expedition, and all the way through, I would be making observations. How fit did they seem, how confident, how scared or nervous? How much food did they have, how much were they carrying, did their footwear fit, how tired were they, how were they interacting with other members of the group? This would carry on continuously, how confident were they on that section, how tired do they look now, were they eating and drinking enough? And at the same time I would be checking outside conditions; how fast we were going, what was the terrain like, how was the weather? Dynamic risk assessment, and I did this constantly because at every point of an expedition, I needed to make decisions based upon all of the factors I had in front of me.

99 times out 100 these decisions would be mundane things like stopping for lunch early, taking a slightly different route, slowing down, or carrying some equipment for a slightly struggling client. Sometimes however the decisions I had to make were potentially the difference between life or death. I have abandoned activities and expeditions more times than I care to remember, and each time had to have that difficult conversation with a client to say that despite them paying me to reach their destination, it wasn’t going to happen. And each time, following that conversation, after the initial disappointment or anger, they all agreed, and in the vast majority of cases stayed as clients.

Why? Because I was making the best decision based on all the evidence I had at the time and my clients trusted me to keep them safe. I didn’t stick to my plan regardless of the changing nature of complex situations, I adapted and pivoted.

They say the sign of a good leader is one who inspires trust in those around them, and will make the hard decisions when others might not. The great Ernest Shackleton put the lives of his men before his own personal glory during attempts to reach the pole when making the decision to turn for home. A lack of provisions forced a tough decision, and as the return journey descended into a desperate battle for survival, which all four were extremely fortunate to survive, the astuteness of Shackleton’s decision was lost on very few.

I look now at the situation within the UK regarding Brexit and think to myself, if Theresa May was an expedition leader, we’d all be dying on a mountain.

The vacuous “leadership” of our PM has led the country blindly on while all the information has been telling her to adapt. Her phrase of “Leave means Leave”, despite being idiocy is actually dangerous in its construction. It is marching us headfirst into an oncoming storm, just because she said she would. She may well reach her destination of the UK leaving the EU, but most of the expedition party will have died from hypothermia. The ERG will probably be there with May, having plundered the food and warm clothes from the frozen bodies of the weakest in the expedition party.

The full blame for all this shouldn’t just sit with May, or the ERG. So many in the political system have let down the people of this country beyond belief. Labour and Corbyn have been equally dangerous, by playing game after game, with the sole aim to become the leader of a death march.

As I look on the current situation I see the dying embers of a broken political system.

One that has let down so many in society, and one which is so consumed by their own ego’s and inflated self-value to change. But if this is to be the case, then what comes next?

I hope to see a move towards open and platform democracy, where representatives move away from top down decision making and canvasing, and move towards true collaborative democratic decision making with local people.

I also see a huge role for civil society to play. The new and emerging democracy may well be decentralised, and rooted in communities both online and offline. How civil society supports this, and moves power from the center to people will be important, and getting a handle on how technology is influencing this will be vital. Platforms like https://decide.madrid.es/ are already showing how technology and decentralised decision making are coming together….how approaches like this develop will be interesting.

Perhaps we just need to take the pirate approach like Sam Conniff Allende of https://www.bemorepirate.com/and create the new rules ourselves.

It is far easier to criticise that to put forward suggestions or to act upon them. I certainly don’t have the answers, and that is why I’m putting the question out there; how do we how do we as a society move past this, and build a better system, one that is fairer, and has real leaders everywhere?

I’m genuinely interested in debate, particularly nuanced debate on this, and from learning from others about how we can move past this. So please do share or comment so we can connect and perhaps do something about this together.

As for me, it’s my local council elections, and I’m wondering how I can put myself forward on a true open democracy platform, or whether that is just playing to their tune….

Cheers