Skills You Hope You Never Need
Before venturing into the beautiful backcountry of British Columbia's snowy mountains, it's wise to take Avalanche Skills Training (AST). The most dramatic part of this course is the beacon search practice: How fast can you locate and dig out a buried object using your avalanche transceiver/receiver, a probe, and a shovel?
If you're out in the wilderness, your friend's life might depend on this. The probability of surviving being buried by an avalanche drops off dramatically after 10 minutes. The situation is chaotic and stressful, the snow will be hard like concrete, and you really don't have much time. So, it's better to get really good at it.
A successful rescue after a full burial makes for an exciting, maybe even heroic, story.
Yet if we're honest, if you have to use these skills, something already went horribly wrong. Did you ignore an avalanche forecast that called for high or extreme danger? Did you venture onto a slope you should have recognized (also from your AST course) to be unstable and likely to produce an avalanche? Did you ignore signs of instability all around you?
Heroics and Upstream Thinking
Dan Heath's book "Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen" describes many such cases where a heroic action overshadows a quieter but ultimately more impactful action.
Catching a robber after a high-stakes car chase is cool. Doing community engagement to keep kids out of trouble in the first place is boring.
A marathon debugging session to hunt down a bug is impressive. Proceeding in small, well-tested steps appears to just slow you down.
Working weekends to make sure a software deployment goes smoothly earns you a pat on the back. Setting up CI/CD automation, monitoring, and automated rollbacks feels like a chore.
If we're being honest, we love the idea of saving the day, and because nothing is ever perfect and foolproof, there sure is a time for heroics. But maybe we can also find satisfaction in preventing untold issues from ever requiring heroics in the first place.
