Articles
Thinking Out Loud
The outdoor education and development sector moves fast. Standards evolve, research builds, and the expectations on practitioners and providers continue to rise.
These articles are our contribution to that conversation — written from the field, grounded in practice, and intended to be useful whether you work in schools, organisations, or the outdoors professionally.
Each piece is an abridged version of a longer article or presentation — the full versions are available on request.
We publish on the things that matter to us: professional standards, programme design, safeguarding, leadership, and growth. If something prompts a question or a conversation, we'd genuinely like to hear from you.
Design & Building
Designing Backwards, Moving Forwards
7 min read
Most training fails not because of poor delivery — but because it was designed from the wrong end. A practical guide to designing programmes that begin with outcomes, build intentionally across knowledge, skills, and values, and actually transfer into practice.
Safety & Risk Management
Carry On As Planned
6 min read
The weather rarely causes the incident — the decision nobody makes does. Through two real near-misses in the rain, a canyon and a capsizing bay, this piece looks at the gap between the person who can see the danger and the person empowered to change the plan. A Plan B nobody's allowed to activate is just paper.
Ten Minutes And Seven More Questions
6 min read
Written first-hand and without a filter, about the care our industry in particular extends to participants but rarely to the people delivering the work. From a young person in crisis to a ten-minute debrief and the pub as the sector's unofficial counselling service, an argument that staff trauma care has to be built in, not improvised.
Think Inside The Box
6 min read
A friend's question about when to retire a climbing harness opens onto something larger: why the rules we're so keen to break are often the ones holding everyone up. On frameworks as a climbing frame — freedom to move, but stay on it — the difference between judgment and preference, and why the precedent you set outlives the experience that made it safe.
Before The Next One
9 min read
I place permanent hardware in Hong Kong rock that other people's lives depend on, and nobody has ever asked me for a qualification. This piece looks at the two ways our sector gets risk wrong — here, where nothing is checked, and elsewhere, where rules get written in weeks by people who have never done the work. Neither keeps anyone safe.
Learning & Development
The Hand On The Tiller
6 min read
We reach for words like leadership, resilience and teamwork as though everyone in the room agrees what they mean. Mostly, we've never checked. This piece takes those big words apart to find something teachable inside them — then turns to leadership itself, and the part we get wrong: when a team succeeds, the success belongs to the team, not the person at the top.
Organisational Growth
Selling With The Vision In Mind
6 min read
Some time ago, a colleague introduced me as Mike "Burning Bridges" Thomas. I'd earned the name. This is a piece about what happens when the vision an organisation sells stops matching the experience it delivers — and why the gap between the two is where trust erodes.
Gloves First
10 min read
An incident described as looking like something from a horror film. Seven qualified, experienced staff on site: two dealt with it, five froze. Freezing is physiology, not a failure of recruitment — but the gap between the course and the moment is where an organisation has influence. Drawing on resuscitation and wilderness first aid research, this piece argues that readiness is built through short, frequent, in-house practice with somebody competent watching it happen, and asks managers a harder question: what is your in-season training actually for?
Professional Practice
Good Habits Don't Take Days Off
6 min read
The kit doesn't change. The person does. This article explores what experience, confidence, and the willingness to deviate from your norm actually do to the tools and techniques you already have — and why developing the person matters more than acquiring the method.
The Half You Think You Know
6 min read
We're drawn to the idea that every proverb hides a wiser, fuller original — yet push on the famous ones and most turn out to be invented. The same thing happens to a team's knowledge: the half-remembered rule, the policy nobody can explain, the reasoning that left with the person who wrote it. How organisations end up confidently, collectively wrong — and the habit that stops it.
Let Them Be Kids
6 min read
We sell the leadership. They remember the rock pool. This article explores the gap between what outdoor programmes are advertised on — leadership, resilience, transformation — and what actually delivers the value on the ground, and why connection, the freedom to simply be a kid, is a real outcome worth designing for rather than the downtime we quietly leave off the proposal.
Yoda Was Wrong
7 min read
