Get Psyched #8 Heuristic Traps

What does a rule of thumb, educated guess, guesstimate, and plain old common sense have in common? They’re all examples of heuristic thinking: a technique that each of us use quite naturally in everyday life. They allow us to reach an immediate goal without putting too much thought into it, meaning we get stuff done quicker. Heuristic techniques are fine when you’re shopping for groceries for example, but heuristic thinking in critical situations that we as paddlers might find ourselves in, can lead to disaster. This issue, I want to talk about how to recognise and avoid heuristic traps. Otherwise known as, ‘check yourself before you wreck yourself ’.

- Sian Sykes

My initial awareness to heuristic traps came from my avalanche awareness training course with Avalanche Geeks whilst preparing for the International Mountain Leader assessment in the Alps. People who call the mountains their playground, such as back-country skiers and alpinists have to be educated to these traps, but the concept can be applied perfectly to stand up paddling, and in fact any adventure sport with elements of risk.

PICKING UP LEMONS

I like to tell my clients that when we collect lemons. Lemons are added margins of safety…things like getting an early start, a good paddling partner who you know how they will cope, not taking shortcuts with your equipment, mobile phone properly charged…Using little self-guiding rules are very good techniques to mitigate our heuristic thinking. The more margins of safety we have in place, the better chance we have of recovering from a heuristic (or any other ) snafu.

When I was paddling around Wales my lemons were things like: I’ve never paddled this area before, it’s a spring tide, there’s ten foot of swell, I’m carrying 40 kg of bags…Based on my experience I would make a judgement call as to how far, or even whether to paddle at all that day.

One particular day on the canal it was like paddling in treacle. I wasn’t as fast as my friends on sea kayaks and it would have been easy to get pressurised thinking ‘well they’ve paddled X distance today, so should I’. Instead, I set small targets of 10km and would stop and see how I felt. Then I’d go again, and ended up paddling 70km.