Decision making is something we do every single day, from the most simple of choices to highly complex and difficult decisions that can affect our and others' well-being. In the backcountry, our decision making can mean the difference between a stellar, fun day in beautiful snow and severe injury or even death. All of the tools you will gain in this learning experience will only serve you as far as you implement them properly, that's why it's so important we dive into our decision making process when we're in complex and demanding situations such as the alpine backcountry.

Decision making in avalanche terrain takes place in what is called a "wicked learning environment"- this refers to an environment in which the outcomes of decisions (e.g., consequential avalanche) provide feedback that may me inaccurate or misleading. For example, if you make the wrong decision, it may not result in catastrophe, or even be clear that you erred. Because avalanche accidents are far fewer in number than the decisions you make, the feedback to many of those decisions, whether good ones or bad ones, is that nothing bad happened. Therefore, simple experience often isn't enough to teach us good decision making (and definitely isn't the fastest pathway).

Decision making in avalanche terrain takes place in what is called a "wicked learning environment"- this means that it won't necessarily provide appropriate feedback to the decisions you make

When you leave this decision making module, you'll be able to:

• Understand that decision making in complex scenarios is best done with a systematic approach, and build a familiarity with the "ingredients" to that systematic approach.
• Build awareness of your decision making process, cognitive shortcuts you might take and the errors in judgement you may expose yourself to in doing so.
• Begin to build a literacy in how to use the decision making aids you will encounter in this course and in the backcountry (such as avalanche forecasts, or decision protocols).
• Define probability and understand very basic probability rules, and appreciate the importance of expressing uncertainty as a probability.
• Appreciate the challenge people have with understanding probability expressions and learn how to effectively express uncertainty.
• Appreciate the inconsistency of using qualitative words (e.g., “likely”, “highly likely”, etc.) to describe uncertainty.
• Appreciate how people estimate the probability of an uncertain event and rely on “heuristics” or cognitive rules of thumb to make the task easier and quicker.
• Understand that while heuristics are quite useful, they can lead to severe and systematic errors which are referred to as biases.
• Build an awareness of all the aspects of decision making, so that you can facilitate review of your decisions in the field and create feedback for yourself.

We'll be diving into decision making and it's elements, as well as characteristics of our minds that benefit and constrain our decision making process- but most importantly, it is important to maintain an introspective awareness and continually review your own decision making strategies so you can continue to stay aware of, and improve your decision making.

In this first two parts of this module, we'll be talking with a decision scientist who works on just these sort of decisions, but on a much larger scale. Let's dive in!