How Far Outdoor Program Risk Management Has Come, and Where It’s Headed
The state of risk management in outdoor programs in the 2020s, seen through five years of external reviews
Over the past generation, risk and safety management in outdoor and experiential education programs has become increasingly professionalized.
In the 1990s, the field started to organize. The Wilderness Risk Management Conference (WRMC) and the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) accreditation standards were established and still influence global practice today. During the 2000s, the foundations of many current standards and norms were debated and set, including the scope and purpose of administrative crisis management plans, participant intake protocols, institutional driving and transportation policies, and backcountry first-aid protocols. In the 2010s, we increasingly recognized how much we share with larger, well-researched fields and how much we can benefit from their insights, such as safety science in aviation and healthcare, and participant engagement in education and psychology. The need for specialized risk management knowledge beyond daily operations led to the creation of more risk management roles during this period, a trend that continues into the 2020s.
Pioneers like Drs. Denise Mitten and Alan Ewert played key roles in researching outdoor and experiential education from the 1980s onward, and mentored subsequent generations. Today, the field’s research paradigm is well established, with about half a dozen dedicated academic journals and over 20 other relevant journals that publish our work in neighboring disciplines.
Tracking how thinking and practice evolve within an industry over time is hard. Academics can do literature reviews to track thinking, but perhaps the best ways to monitor how thinking changes practice is to look at conference session data. I chaired the WRMC steering committee from 2023 through 2025 and wrote a paper analyzing 30 years of conference programs to track the field’s evolution (Slay, 2023; read the full paper).
Another way is to analyze site visit findings for trends and changes. In the first half of the 2020s, I led over 15 reviews across the US, Canada, and Asia. Organizations that seek a risk management review typically invite a qualified specialist to assess their plans and practices, offer insights, and suggest improvements; see my posts on the review process and 8 reasons to get a review. An external review provides an outside perspective that reveals blind spots and shares industry trends around common challenges and solutions from across the field. Throughout this decade’s reviews, certain issues have repeatedly emerged across diverse organizations, ranging from therapeutic and conservation programs to wilderness-, volunteer-, independent and international school-based programs, day camps, and residential facilities. These recurring findings provide a glimpse into the current state of risk management in the 2020s, and highlight areas for growth into the rest of the decade and beyond.
Safety still lives with a few trusted people
Programs rely on their most trusted people more than they realize. Every program has unwritten, social norms that guide “the way we do work, here.” Senior staff are trusted by orgs and the many junior staff they mentor, and they’re usually the keepers of these unwritten rules.
Social agreements about how work is done become problematic when daily work and safety depend on them, and they differ from the documented rules and expectations. Administrators, insurers, lawyers, and senior leaders need visibility into how safety is planned for and managed, and social agreements change and leave with the people who keep them. Programs propped up by social norms are at risk of single-person dependencies and, even more so, of migrating work practices to the point of failure. A review makes these norms visible, and the findings help a program decide which agreements should become written into policy while those people are still around to explain them.
Safety, work, and know-how should be shared, and written artifacts such as policies, curricula, and protocols should capture and codify these norms. Making them available to everyone and visible to the oversight and support functions is integral to the strength of the entire organizational system.
Emergency and crisis plans are written but not practiced
It is unusual these days to find a program without field emergency response plans or an administrative crisis management plan. It’s a sign of progress and professionalization, but as a field we have more room to grow. In the age of social media, crises move faster now. Climate threats are more severe and unpredictable, and programs are facing unprecedented events on a regular basis. The old adage to pull the binder off the shelf as the first step in a crisis is out of date.
These days, plans only work when the people who implement them have rehearsed it. A culture of readiness is the new expectation, and it looks like documented, regular practice sessions through tabletop discussions, conversations built into normal meeting agendas, and evidence that all staff are abreast of their roles and have practiced them (see a recent example in my analysis of the Camp Mystic event). Pre-season discussions with local authorities and community leaders are now necessary and shouldn’t be considered as “nice to have” (seemy piece about planning with local partners).
Practice sessions should test the plan, not the people. I’ve watched organizations put staff on the spot during drills and push them to the point of failure. I’m always surprised when some consultants and executives want exactly that, despite everything we know about healthy, productive learning. I’ve led crises in organizations where staff had been through drills like those and can say firsthand that the trauma from the drills is not helpful when it shows up during the real event.
Borrowed artifacts
The field has worked hard to ensure the right documents are in place. Accreditation and regulatory reviews check that a document exists, and they don’t check that anyone practices it or that it works in the program’s own setting. Copying a policy from another organization and pasting it as your own is easy, but it’s the wrong thing to do. Another organization’s document can be a starting place, but the policies, protocols, and plans staff depend on should be specific to your organization and its context.
In one review I led, a university program had imported its safety management approach straight from the commercial guiding industry, where certified guides work with an autonomy that suits a small ratio guiding environment but doesn’t suit a program that is part of a larger institution designed to educate and train students. Many smaller providers do the same. They make good money in the summer, keeping the organization afloat by doing recreational guiding work. In the shoulder seasons they take on school education programs. Yet, the staff training curriculum and activity policies don’t match the new context. This is a no-no. Guiding and governing docs that are explicit about the program's purpose and context reduce confusion and ambiguity and ensure that all staff, partners, and participants operate under the same rules and assumptions.
I’ve even seen consultants sell ready-to-implement templates built for this kind of copying. Borrowed documents are a barrier to safety progress across the field, and both reviews and accident analyses show it. I wrote about what goes wrong when programs adopt tools and forms from elsewhere without questioning them in What Outdoor Programs Can Learn From Aviation, where a purchased documents are embedded with assumptions from a different cultural and operating environment.
Risk communication and informed consent
Effective risk communication helps families understand the environment, the context, and the activities their child will take part in. Liability waivers and acknowledgement of risk forms are now established standards. But legal language written by lawyers is hardly accessible to families gauging whether or not to send their child, or who are trying to work out what questions to ask and how they can best prepare their child for a successful and safe program experience. This is twice as hard for parents who are sending their child to a third-party provider as part of their school’s requirements.
A whole system should be in place that actually informs families of the risks and how to prepare for them, and a back-and-forth dialogue about how the child should prepare and how the program can reasonably accommodate the child’s needs. Providing a stack of documents, like waivers, packing lists, and codes of conduct, is the minimum standard. But, expecting them to read and understand them isn’t good enough. Safety requires a thoughtful and patient partnership, which is hard for programs that believe in accessible programming and operate on thin financial margins and rely on staff to wear multiple hats.
Climate change is adding to the need for more robust risk communication and methods to ensure informed consent. In fact, this is a major area of climate resiliency planning the Wilderness Climate Lab put together and is encouraging programs to address. Families should know about the climate risks the program is managing and prepared for, and they should know how to receive and request information when emergency alerts are issued. They should also understand that group itineraries and activities will be altered to protect health and safety, even if their student isn’t the one with a respiratory condition made worse by poor air quality, for example.
Psychosocial protocols aren’t written yet
We’ve come a long way to build first aid and medical protocols. More programs are seeking doctors or other qualified medical professionals to support in advisory capacities, and an organization that has its own evacuation criteria for medical incidents is standard.
However, the definition of safety has expanded. Actually, I believe outdoor adventure and experiential education programs were ahead of the curve in the late 90s and 2000s; I was pleasantly surprised to see these as topics on early WRMC meeting notes and conference programs. But, now that the larger safety science field has caught up and surpassed, our small field has more catching up to do.
I find it interesting that most staff and organizational leaders I talk to readily recognize that safety includes behavioral and mental health. But, there is still confusion about how to prepare for and address it at the organizational level. New mental health first aid training is becoming the norm, but adding more requirements for field staff is a slippery slope; there’s already quite a lot to keep up with for a demographic typically at the beginning of their careers and in a field that isn’t known for making people rich.
Organizations can do more to support staff and their participants, and you can read that as they should be doing more to assert their care for their own people, by building protocols and establishing advisory relationships with mental health providers. I often see organizations inadvertently expecting staff to identify psychosocial issues and figure out how to deal with them on their own. This is the cost of ambiguity, and it is burning them out. Equally concerning, staff who are activity and education professionals (not mental health professionals) are confused about what to address and how to talk and write about them. For example, addressing a diagnosis or label might infringe on someone’s legal rights. Instead, pre-determining protocols and providing written guidance helps staff to recognize and manage observed behaviors, instead of their assumption of underlying conditions and diagnoses.
Strengths
There are many visible strengths in our field, and it’s part of what makes our work so special. It’s all about the people, mainly. We’re a people-centered field, and the people who choose to work in it don’t do it for the money. They’re dedicated to learning, growth, nature and sustainability, stewardship, and safety. They have real, meaningful relationships with their colleagues and participants, and they tend to trust one another. These are strengths that should be leveraged in the next steps and in the years to come to make progress on the issues outlined in this piece.
Why insiders are disadvantaged
An executive director reading this list can fairly ask why nobody inside the organization saw these findings first. Practice changes one small step at a time, and each step looks normal to the people taking it, so the change is genuinely hard to notice from the inside. Leaders are also busy running their organizations and their programs, and a view across the whole field and its peer programs is a difficult perspective to see. The safety leaders tasked with facilitating organizational learning and improvement, no matter how insightful they are, are at a natural disadvantage because organizational change requires individual behavior change. People’s attitudes, beliefs, and values are underpinned by how they view their own job, and initiating such change is hard when personal relationships, organizational hierarchies, and professional boundaries are involved.
The next steps you can take
The field has spent a generation building the systems and norms described in this post. These findings are the current edge of that progress, not a verdict on any program or the industry. Every program has its own version of them, and the strongest programs are the ones that keep asking where they stand. Safety leaders can start by assessing their own program for shades of these findings. The easiest way to begin is to use a free self-assessment, the Program Risk Scorecard.
To get a comprehensive assessment and targeted insight, specific to your organization, reach out. Slay Risk conducts program risk reviews for schools and providers of outdoor and experiential programs across Asia and North America, with worldwide availability.
References
Slay, S. (2023). What’s next? Thirty years of WRMC [Paper presentation]. Adventure Risk Research Symposium, Wilderness Risk Management Conference, Portland, OR, United States.
FAQ
What does an external program risk review typically find?
A review usually finds a program doing many things well. It also names the areas where the organization can improve and how it relates to a maturing field. These appear in most programs in some form, including safety that leans on a few trusted people, crisis plans that are written but not yet practiced, documents adapted from other settings, risk communication with families, and psychosocial support. Every program's mix is its own, and a good review tells a program which of these matter most for it and what to do next.
Do review findings mean a program is unsafe?
A review doesn't rate a program as safe or unsafe, and a finding is not a safety verdict. Findings identify where a program's risk management can be strengthened and made less dependent on any one person. Every program has them, including mature and well-run ones, and working through them is a normal part of how a program builds more resilient systems over time.
How does an outside reviewer see things an experienced team can't?
An experienced team knows its own program better than any outside reviewer. Yet, this familiarity can also hinder their perspective. Systems and routines that have evolved over time for good reasons may appear as the only way to work to those inside the team. An external reviewer, lacking this history, evaluates the program against a broader set of standards, including peer organizations and current field practices. For an internal team, making such broad comparisons independently can be challenging.
Should a program wait for an incident to get a review?
No, and the best programs don't. Most reviews are proactive and are prompted by growth, a change in leadership, or a board that wants independent assessment of good stewardship and steps to incorporate into their continuous improvement plan. Conducting a review before any major incident occurs allows a program to leverage its strengths and plan its next steps independently, with its own team and timeline. This approach reflects a well-organized organization operates..
