实用技巧
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这是一个不断增长的实用资源库，这些资源来自我们多年来在该领域的工作——简短的提示、有用的链接、值得阅读的研究以及我们认为值得了解的行业最新动态。
有时，它只是一个清晰明了、即刻可用的简单想法；有时，它可能是一份管理机构的最新动态链接、一篇研究论文，或是我们关注到的某个领域的信息。无论哪种形式，筛选标准都一样：如果它出现在这里，我们认为它值得您花时间阅读。
定期更新。如果您有任何疑问或想与我们交流，欢迎随时联系我们。
Consistency Beats Randomness
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.