This is a guest post by Oli Knight, Principal of Ark Acton Academy. I’m fascinated by the way heuristics – decision-making rules – can both help and hinder effective practice. I find Oli’s take interesting for two reasons: first, the focus on school leaders thinking. Second, the way Oli has taken research from another domain – climbing – and used it to look at schools afresh. The post offers valuable ideas for anyone interested in how leaders think, and how they might make better decisions.

It’s getting close to midnight as we enter the last part of the drive from London into Fort William. Its raining and conditions don’t sound great. The SAIS (Scottish avalanche information service) forecasts are bad and fresh snow is falling on top of an unstable layer of snow. The winds are strong and blowing in the wrong direction. Having spent 8 hours in the car to get to the Fort we are keen to get up onto the Ben and get something done. We make a last-minute phone call to a local to get the latest beta on the conditions up high. The overall picture sounds pretty grim and the next couple of days are probably not the best for climbing. But we’ve driven over night to get up here, made a commitment to get a big route done and have been in the same location countless times before over the past twenty years. Let’s just get up there, take a deep breath and push on, it will probably be fine, right? It always has been in the past. And so begins the start of many a mountain epic as we fall into classic heuristic traps.

In recent months I have watched with a mixture of vicarious interest and fear school leaders being executed on social media and in the press as a result of decisions they have made. Most school leaders, especially those that take jobs in failing inner-city schools with poor reputations and falling rolls, do so (I would argue) out of a commitment to making society more equal. Seeing how easy it appears to end up in a maelstrom made me reflect even more on how decision-making in the moment can escalate very quickly into a situation you may not metaphorically live through. The similarity to decision-making in the high mountains seems too close to ignore.

I have always felt as a leader that I make good decisions based on sound moral judgement and expert knowledge. These decisions aren’t always popular, but they are based on what I believe is in the long-term interests of the students and the school. However, it would be naïve to think it always plays out like this and the speed with which a Headteacher is required to make decisions, and the scope of the problems they have to solve, necessarily means decision-making can be a rushed process.

This reflection led to me re-visiting a paper I had first read some years ago. The paper, “Evidence of heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents” presented at the 2002 International Snow Science Workshop by Ian McCammon, gives some interesting insights into the decision-making process in the backcountry.

Decision heuristics, mental processes used in decision making, are a fundamental way for people to reduce the effort of making a decision to arrive at satisfactory outcomes/solutions. Heuristics simplify the amount of information individuals process by relying on memories based on past experience and simple algorithms to look for decision clues. They rely on less information, and they examine fewer alternatives.

Johnson et al. ‘Rethinking the heuristic traps paradigm in avalanche education: Past, present and future.’ 2020

A heuristic trap in this instance is where the backcountry skier ignores the large data set modern tech gives us access to and incorrectly applies a rule of thumb, based for example on previous experience of skiing the route or terrain.

McCammon investigated 622 accidents in the United States between 1972 and 2001 and identified four common traps: Familiarity, Social Proof, Commitment and Scarcity. What was surprising was that experienced backcountry users were as likely to be caught by these traps as inexperienced.

(The summary from the 4 traps is taken from here.)

  1. Familiarity

Is where a group is skiing slopes they have skied many times in the past. It seems when we are skiing terrain we know well we let our guard down and ignore warning signs. When groups of experienced and inexperienced backcountry travellers were compared, experienced skiers were at a distinct advantage on unfamiliar terrain where they critically examined available data. On familiar slopes there was no difference between experienced and inexperienced groups.

2. Social Proof

We tend to believe behaviour is correct or can be justified when we witness other people engaged in it. This can range from people crossing piste-closed markings to decisions on whether to ski a slope. McCammon found that social proof affected even groups with significant avalanche awareness where they witnessed groups similar to themselves on a slope.

3. Commitment

This is the tendency to carry on with a course of action whatever the indications to the contrary. Groups that had a high commitment were trying to achieve a stated goal with the pressure of darkness, timing or weather constraints. These groups were more likely to expose themselves to danger.

4. Scarcity

When we perceive resources to be in short supply we tend to compete for them more aggressively. McCammon found that the presence of untracked powder snow within easy reach of other skiers seemed to have a significant effect on the evaluation of risk.

This issue with heuristics doesn’t seem to only affect backcountry skiers. Elstein (Heuristics and biases: selected errors in clinical reasoning, Academic Medicine, Vol 74, No.7, 1999) reflects on the role that heuristics play in faulty clinical decision-making. Elstein attempts to codify these through their role in firstly reaching a diagnosis and then on deciding upon a course of treatment. The paper codifies these traps through the creation of a framework for analysing clinical decisions and ends with the speculation that an awareness of the limitations of clinical decision-making as a result of heuristics and bias may allow for more formal, systematic, quantitative approaches to making decisions to be deployed – ones that are designed to minimise these biases. If evidence and decision-analysis are routinely employed, the prevalence of biases in decision-making would decline over time.

It seems likely then that school leaders fall into these same traps with the way we make decisions in schools. We often, in a similar vein to both medicine and backcountry skiing, operate with imperfect data in time-sensitive situations. We are often called upon to make decisions quickly and seldom apply decision-analysis prior to deploying the decision.

I am sure most of us would like to believe that we apply sound scientific thinking to our decisions having reviewed a large data set but the honest reality is that is unlikely to be the case. Whilst domain-knowledge is undoubtedly important in decision-making, does familiarity with the terrain make some decisions more prone to heuristic traps that allow a quick decision to be made at the expense of the best decision? Would schools benefit from a simple framework for school leaders that allows decisions to be analysed prior to putting them into play? What wouldn’t work is a long checklist of things to think about; schools are too busy for this to be practical.

Applying hard-rules to decision making:

In a bid to reduce error and risk, avalanche training courses attempt to codify decision-making through the creation of hard rules that can be applied to mitigate heuristics:

  1. Always use the latest avalanche bulletin
  2. Set absolute limits: 40 degrees in NW, N and NE facing slopes when the danger is moderate, 40 degrees on all slopes when considerable and 30 degrees when the danger is high.
  3. Spacing out on slopes to reduce the forces on the snow pack and the risk of multiple burials
  4. Evaluate the experience and capacity of the group and offset the terrain decision against this.

From my own experience of both alpinism and school leadership these hard rules can serve to keep you safe when under pressure. My friends and I have a basic rule for assessing snow when in the high mountains – “If there’s a question, there is no question.” This simple rule allows us to mitigate heuristics by having to stop and think prior to continuing. In other words, if we have a concern, there is probably a reason for that concern and we should stop and apply a hard rule.

In school leadership I apply some basic hard rules using this same premise. These hard rules are simple yet help ensure I don’t get swayed by a heuristic trap. Some examples of these rules are:

  1. Always run a new process or policy past a serving Headteacher. Get them to sense check the underlying reason for the idea.
  2. Always bring it home first – before deciding on a course of action I hypothetically apply that action to a member of my own family. How would they feel and react? If it feels unpalatable, then you probably shouldn’t proceed.
  3. Always link it into the school vision – does the proposed course of action strengthen the school vision for our students. If it does not directly link to the vision, consider stopping and re-evaluating