The Anchor Point
Ideas that hold up under load
Hey Reader
Last time I wrote about why experience matters so much under pressure. It’s what lets you recognise a pattern fast enough to act instead of freeze. The obvious problem is that most of us don’t do rescues often enough to build that experience on the job. So where does it come from?
Preparedness training is the answer, but not just any training. You need to regularly practice the raw skills, and you need multiple small rescue simulations that put people under actual pressure. That combination, skill plus pressure, is what builds the pattern recognition a real incident demands.
When you’re designing that training, it helps to predict how a rescue is likely to unfold and keep the skills in a logical progression rather than throwing everyone in the deep end. There are a few useful ways to structure it:
- Breaking a skill down into progressions, so people build competence in stages rather than attempting the full technique cold.
- Applying a progression inside a specific scenario, so the skills get tested in context rather than in isolation.
- Running a multi-level exercise that focuses on how incident management, the on-site team, and any responding agencies interact, because a lot of what goes wrong in a real rescue isn’t the rigging, it’s the coordination.
None of that training actually sticks without a debrief. Reflection and an active improvement cycle afterwards are what turn a training session into gained experience. Skip that step and the exercise doesn’t transfer: you’ve just had a nice day out with ropes.
The next two posts in this series get into what that training should actually look like: which skills to prioritise, and how to build progressions for both a scenario and a specific technique.
If your team trains occasionally but doesn’t have a structured simulation and debrief cycle built in, that’s usually the gap between “we’ve done some training” and “we’re actually ready.”
Designing and running that kind of preparedness training, simulations, debriefs, the lot, is a big part of what I do. Get in touch by replying to this email if you want help building it for your team.
Grant
