Top Tips
No Padding. No Hedging. No Death By Disclaimer.
This is a growing collection of practical resources drawn from years of working in the field — short tips, useful links, research worth reading, and updates from the sector that we think are worth knowing about.
Sometimes it's a single idea, clearly expressed and immediately usable. Sometimes it's a link to a governing body update, a research paper, or something from the field that caught our attention. Either way, the filter is the same: if it's here, we think it's worth your time.
Updated regularly. If something prompts a question or a conversation, you know where to find us.
Make the Caveat Travel
Professional Practice
Ask most people what RICE stands for — Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation — and they'll tell you it's what you do to heal an injury. What they won't tell you is when it applies and when it doesn't, because that part never travelled with the acronym. Even Dr Gabe Mirkin, who coined RICE in 1978, publicly revised it decades later: ice and complete rest can actually delay healing in some cases. The four letters spread across the world. The situational nuance stayed behind.
This is what happens to almost any piece of knowledge as it passes from person to person. The tidy, memorable half travels easily. The context — when it's true, when it isn't, why it was decided — gets left off, because context is rarely neat.
It happens with proverbs: half the "fuller originals" people quote so confidently were invented later. It happens with research: "7% of communication is words" was a narrow finding about feelings, stretched into a law it was never meant to be. And it happens inside your own organisation — with the half-remembered "the way we do things here," the unwritten rule nobody can explain, the risk assessment whose reasoning left with the person who wrote it.
The fix is simple to say and easy to skip. When you pass on a rule, pass on the reasoning. State when it applies and when it doesn't. A caveat that lives only in your head is protecting no one.
If it's worth communicating the rule, it's worth communicating the part that makes the rule make sense.
What's Your Hidden Curriculum?
Facilitation
Ask most facilitators what their session teaches and they'll give you the objective on the plan: leadership, communication, collaboration. All true. But it's rarely the whole story — and often not the part that lasts.
Underneath every stated objective runs a hidden curriculum: the things you're really building, whether you named them or not. Some of it is individual, and it shows up as far transfer. Kayaking in a straight line looks like a paddling skill; underneath it is perseverance — the willingness to fail, adjust, and try again. Building a fire is a practical task; underneath it is critical thinking and problem-solving. We know what we need, so how do we make it efficient, how do we make it work? Folding clothes and keeping a tidy camp is discipline. Tying your own shoelaces — rather than waiting for someone else or reaching for velcro — is self-sufficiency.
And some of the hidden curriculum is bigger than the individual. Leave No Trace isn't a rule about litter; it's environmental stewardship. Respect. Service. Giving back to the community. None of these are your headline objective, but they're what tie the day to your mission. You can run a leadership programme all you like — but you don't have a school, a team, or a business unless the community is behind you. That gets built in, not bolted on.
The stated objective is what you measure. The hidden curriculum is what they carry.
Colouring Without the Numbers
Safety & Risk Management
Risk assessments are supposed to help you make decisions. So why do so many scoring systems produce a number that still requires interpretation?
A score of 8 — is that acceptable? It depends who you ask, what they've seen and what kind of day they're having.
Colour removes that ambiguity.
The Bow-Tie Model
The bow-tie is a simple risk visualisation tool. At the centre sits the hazard — the top event. On the left, the threats that could cause it. On the right, the consequences if it occurs. Prevention controls sit on the left side, mitigation controls on the right. One diagram, both directions of risk.
It's a useful mental model for any activity assessment. Before you apply a rating, you've already had to think about what could go wrong and what you'd do about it.
The Colour System
Once you've assessed through the bow-tie, assign a colour:
🟢 Green — minimal risk, proceed normally
🟡 Yellow — low risk, proceed with awareness, staff briefed
🟠Orange — moderate risk, stop and assess, precautions required
🔴 Red — high risk, significant modifications or alternatives needed
⬛ Black — extreme risk, do not proceed under any circumstances
The power of colour over numbers is immediacy. Everyone understands a red light. Nobody intuitively understands a risk score of 12.
Black means black. No debate, no interpretation, no "let's see how it goes."
That clarity matters most when conditions are changing fast, when you're tired or when someone is pushing you to continue.
The system doesn't make the decision for you. It makes the decision harder to avoid.
Good Habits Don't Take Days Off
Professional Practice
There's a climber I know who taps every hold before she commits to it. She's been doing it since she started climbing, which was outdoors where loose rock is a genuine hazard, and never stopped. She brought it up in conversation recently — even though she's indoors now, she still has the habit. She'd picked it up from watching me, outdoors, and it had just stuck.
The answer: loose holds and spinners exist indoors too. But more than that — a habit you only apply sometimes isn't really a habit. It's a task you have to remember. And tasks you have to remember get forgotten, skipped, or deprioritised exactly when you're tired, distracted, or under pressure. Which is precisely when you need them most.
Consistency isn't about being rigid. It's about removing the decision. When something is always done, you don't have to spend energy deciding whether to do it. It's already done. The habit frees up attention for everything else.
This applies well beyond climbing. Diet that works three days a week. Exercise that happens when you feel like it. Checking in with your team when things seem difficult. Reading when you have time. The benefit of any practice is compounded by regularity — and undermined by randomness.
There's a secondary gain too. Consistent habits slow you down just enough to stay calm. The tap of a hold, the pause before a decision, the moment of checking before committing — these aren't delays. They're the space in which good judgement lives.
Same kit, different person. What you get out of any tool, technique, or practice depends entirely on what you bring to it.
Let Them Specialise
Facilitation
Think about speed dating. In its best form, you're exposed to a wide variety of people — lots of chances. In its worst, you find a genuine connection in the first conversation and the bell rings and takes it away from you.
We do something similar with team roles.
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The standard approach: write out roles on cards, assign them, then rotate them after lunch or the following morning. The idea is broad exposure — lots of different opportunities. But what happens if someone is good at something? What if they enjoy it? Should that be taken away from them because of a schedule?
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Try this instead: assign roles early and let people own them. The same way it works outside the programme in the real world – we do not consistently swap roles and positions, we find what we are good at and stick to it.
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The more time someone spends in a role, the more confident they become — and the more visible their skills are, including the soft ones. Constantly rotating makes it genuinely difficult to see those attributes emerge. You're watching someone start, not someone develop.
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There's a deeper question underneath this. Are you trying to build a team or run a group? They're not the same thing. A team has complementary roles, mutual accountability, and shared ownership of outcomes. A group has a leader who assigns tasks and holds responsibility.
Neither is wrong — but they call for different approaches. Constant rotation tends to keep things in group territory, even when you're aiming for something more.​​
If you want a team, give people the time and space to actually become one.
What Is Ice, Actually?
Facilitation
We use the phrase constantly. Breaking the ice. Icebreakers. But ask yourself honestly: what is ice? What exactly are we trying to break?
I was working with a school group recently, and during the staff debrief the teachers flagged that in some groups there was still evidence of ice — even after the opening activities. It made me think about how often we assume everyone is talking about the same thing when we use that term.
Too often, icebreakers come down to a name game, a quick bit of fun, and maybe something involving communication or cooperation. And then that's it. If you tried to draw a line on most lesson plans between where icebreaking ends and team activities begin, you'd struggle. That line should be clear.
So what is ice, actually?
Think about what happens in real life when you meet someone new. What are the barriers you're navigating? A handshake — the breaking down of physical boundaries. Eye contact. Listening, and being listened to. An emotional safety net where you can share something without being guarded. Motivation to continue the conversation. Trust.
Ice is a series of specific factors that hinder a group from bonding:
Speaking — Eye contact — Listening — Physical comfort — Emotional safety — Motivation — Trust
These don't all resolve themselves at once, and they don't all require the same kind of activity. Trust, for example, isn't something you can manufacture with a name game. It has to be built through a sequence of smaller moments that each earn it.
Barriers to learning sit within three categories:
Student barriers — preconceptions, peer status, learning style, personal state, expectations
Facilitation barriers — talking too much, forcing outcomes, using the group to pressure individuals, being negative
Environmental barriers — the space, clothing, temperature, lighting, how the environment is presented
Effective icebreakers are structured to work on specific factors within these categories — in the order that makes most sense for that particular group. Not all factors need to be addressed individually, and as with all facilitation, it should be tailored to the group rather than run as a cookie-cutter activity.
The question to ask before any session: which barriers are most likely to be present in this group, and what does my opening sequence actually do about them?
Teach the Reasons Why
Not Just the One Right Way
Professional Practice
There's a phrase for the best outcome when you try to get a group of independent-minded people to all do exactly the same thing the same way: herding cats. You can try. But you'll exhaust yourself, and the cats will do what they were going to do anyway. Worst outcome is that they do what you asked...
Teaching only one right way — without explanation, without context, without reason — creates the same problem in reverse. Instead of cats going in all directions, you get people going in only one. Nobody questions. Nobody thinks. Nobody innovates. And if something new does come along, they rally against it — because it's different from the only thing they were ever taught.
This came up in a debate about a climbing knot video. Someone argued: why teach a knot that can fail? Just teach the perfect one.
But here's the thing: all knots can fail. Figure of eights — ends pulled perpendicular to the knot. Bowlines — cyclic loading. Clove hitches — where on the rope are you tying them? There is no such thing as perfect. Some knots are better in certain contexts and situations than others. The answer isn't to narrow the field down to one option and tell people never to question it.
The answer is to teach the reasons why.
What type of rope? What thickness of rope? What direction is the load? What is the situation? Without context, even the "correct" knot is just a habit waiting to be applied in the wrong place.
This matters beyond climbing. In any field, in any organisation, in any team — the moment you stop teaching people to think and start just telling them what to do, you've created a system that can't adapt. It can only repeat.
Promote knowledge. Not less of it.
Rock Anchors, Bolts & Corrosion
Know What You're Looking For
Safety & Risk Management
Safety is always paramount. And knowing how and why we are safe is crucial to our work — and to keeping ourselves and the people we're responsible for out of harm's way.
There have been recent tragedies in the climbing world. Added to that, the environment we work in here in Hong Kong — the humidity, the heat, the coastal exposure — makes corrosion a particularly real and present risk. Knowing what to look for, and knowing how to check it, isn't optional. It's essential.
The UIAA has invested significantly in research related to rock anchors, with a particular focus on corrosion and stress corrosion cracking failure. A major milestone was the release of the updated UIAA Rock Anchors Standard in 2020. The challenge now is making sure both bolters and climbers actually know about the issues, know what to look for and are using the right gear.
What Questions Are There?
Facilitation
You know the moment. You've just finished presenting or briefing something, you ask "Does anyone have any questions?" — and silence. Not because there aren't any, but because nobody wants to be the first.
Try this instead: "What questions are there?"
It's a small shift in wording but a significant shift in dynamic. The first phrasing is passive — it puts the responsibility entirely on the group and makes asking feel like an individual act. The second assumes questions exist and simply invites them forward. It coaxes rather than waits.
Facilitate literally means to make easier. If your job is to facilitate questions, make it easier for people to ask them — starting with the words you use to invite them.
Education Is Not Just Job Training
Learning & Development
US Representative Suzanne Bonamici made a pointed observation during a congressional hearing that cuts to the heart of why experiential and arts-based education matters.
Through studying subjects not traditionally associated with the workplace — theatre, arts, humanities — people develop confidence, communication, creativity, and collaboration.
Skills that turn out to be exactly what businesses, organisations and humanity needs most.
You cannot judge a degree, a discipline, or a career path by its perceived economic value or immediate return on investment.
Civilisation, at its best, is defined by the ability to explore things that aren't required for immediate survival. Our greatest works — in culture, science, and society — have come from people who strayed from the purely logical, purely capitalistic route and did something that, in the long run, benefited everyone.