These are the minimum baseline obligations of the adventure or tour guide:
 |
| photo by Jeff Jackson |
My adventure risk consulting sometimes leads to offering expert opinion in legal proceedings. My role is typically to help legal counsel and the courts understand the 'reasonable person' test, and answer the question: what is the baseline criteria to define a reasonable guide's performance?
This can be a big topic, with many context specific factors. Our Managing Risk book dedicates a chapter to the topic, however these are what the minimum baseline criteria boils down to:
- First and foremost, the guide supervises. The guide is in charge of the group and the scenario, and it is expected that whatever goes on within that bubble does so under the eye of or the direction of the guide. Indeed, ‘failure to supervise’ shows up in many related adventure guiding lawsuits.
- Secondly, guides take care of people. Within the parameters of the activity, trip or environment, the guide’s job is to look out for their clients. In North America, the guide is more than the one who knows the way.
- Third, the guide is expected to perform as other guides would in that situation. This is the ‘reasonable guide’ test. A guide needs to know the typical and expected behaviours that would be endorsed by their peers, and reliably perform to those. To go beyond or outside what most guides would consider ‘normal’ is to expose oneself to claims of failing in their duty as a guide.
- Fourth: guides assess risk. Dynamic risk assessment is a continual process, and risk assessment as a planning tool happens every trip and as a part of staff briefings.
- Fifth is safety briefings. Guide inform their clients of the expected hazards and outlines the expectations on the client to assume and manage some aspect of their own safety.
- Sixth and lastly, the guide understands that in some aspects their role is defined and prescribed by their manager, and in others it is up to the individual guide to do the right thing. Large aspects of the adventure or tour guide job are unsupervised. The guide is on their own to steer the boat, lead their group, or set up a site. No one is looking over their shoulder to ensure they are doing it right. Within those acts, their operation may prescribe what lines to take down a rapid, what trails are suitable and which are not, and what a suitable site set up looks like. There are myriad opportunities for the guide to take short cuts or skimp on safety – but routines are in place so ensure consistent, quality programs that fall within prescribed risk tolerance guidelines. The guide’s role is to perform to these invisible lines, even when no one else is looking.
Chapter 1.1 in the Managing Risk book details these factors, along with the following chapters. Refer to that text or get in touch to discuss further.