Beaky's Blather

“For 5 days each week, January, February and March 1986 my men and I have been in Scotland: in the Cairngorms. Each day, in the snow and the wind, on the ice, we have trudged the mountains…. that has been our life, our winter in Scotland…. and a hard time we have had of it, in Scotland. Each week you have sent us a new cohort of your fit young men from your base in England and, under our watchful eyes, they have confronted the challenge that the Scottish mountains offer in their serious way. Mountaineering in the Alps it is often said, is good training for a winter in Scotland. You are a fool not to take the Scottish mountains in winter seriously. Too many people who didn’t have lost their lives. I don’t underestimate the Cairngorms in winter.  You do want the training I believe, but your Civil Servants have challenged the budget. You want the training, but cheaper. This weekend for your most senior Station Execs is designed to help you understand the challenge your people confront and its ‘value for money”I finished my short speech, sat down and the dinner continued. An increasing buzz of conversation swallowed the empty space into which my message had plopped.  Tomorrow I would lead this group of very senior officers up into the same mountains that had each week challenged their men; into the snow and ice, the white-out blindness of my cramponed world.  The following morning, in the dawn cold, we boarded the Landrovers, our breath misting the windows, and crunched the rutted road up into the mountains.  By 8am, assembled and ruck sacked, we walked upwards into a sleeting wind. I watched their faces as they passed me; each determined to show the strength of limb and lung that they had all undoubtedly once mustered in their younger, more junior careers. They were here to sample a day of what their men endured for a week, to appreciate the extreme challenge they confronted and the training value it offered. High in a corrie, on steep snow, we approached the bottom of a twelve-foot, overhanging cornice. The group squatted and peered upwards, clearly finding it hard to imagine how they might cross this vertical boundary between them and the high plateau above.  ‘Cut a tunnel though with your Ice axe,’ I called into the moderate wind that tugged at us incessantly.  I gestured towards a face in a balaclava and goggles; he stepped forward and began to hack at the ice above his head. Someone moved up from below and held him in place above him by his hips. They were both engulfed as the hacked snow cascaded.  I watched as the group held the ropes and waited. After fifteen minutes, an upward tunnel through the cornice offered a way up and the first man’s boots thrashed as he struggled through.  The others followed, kicking in the front points of their crampons as they stepped up the short pitch of vertical ice into the tunnel cut through the cornice.  I followed as last man. Through the cornice, we were on top of the Cairngorm Plateau, in near white-out conditions and hit immediately by the full blast of the high mountain wind. It raged and pulled at us in a constant press of noise. As I clambered upwards over the ice lip I could see the group ahead of me, couched low together in a huddle for protection and I gestured for them to follow me away from the edge of the Corrie and its eight hundred foot abyss. Our faces leaning close, I explained briefly that these extreme conditions were normal and faced by their men routinely, making our expectation of clear communication and leadership more challenging. ‘Who would like to lead the group next?’ I enquired. ‘I’d like to do it if I may Paul,’ replied a goggled face.  The group and I waited – for too long – whilst he scrutinised his map and handled his compass, constantly harassed by the tugging wind. His colleagues squatted, backs to the wind and waited, cold penetrating their inadequate, Service-issue clothing.  ‘Right,’ announced the figure in command, at last, ‘Bearing 275, distance 1200 metres, flat and slightly descending ground, time to destination 17 minutes. Any questions?’ No one had. They wanted to get moving, to get away from this frozen, wind-torn tundra, down to a quieter place. ‘Follow me,’ announced the leader as he turned and began to track his compass bearing. I allowed them all to walk a dozen steps before bellowing for them all to ‘stop!’.   Six goggled heads turned to look at me though the murk. ‘Your plan is badly flawed Sir,’ I shouted over the wind. ‘In what way Paul?’ I recognised the voice of the most senior of the very senior officers in the group.  I gestured them to follow me and edged slowly forward into the white fog across the ice-white snow, buffeted by the wind.  Within ten more metres, close beneath our feet, the edge of the cornice through – which we had recently climbed  – appeared, revealing a thousand-foot drop to the Corrie bottom. The route the appointed leader, the most senior officer in the group, had planned – and none of his junior execs had challenged – entailed a direct bearing, to the correct destination, but one however that led us over a cliff – in near zero visibility conditions – rather than follow the curve of the land that circled above the vertical drop.  When we had re-planned and correctly navigated safely around the corrie edge and across the wild plateau, eventually descending to a quieter place.  Sheltered by some rocks, we sat together as a group and I asked these senior officers what had happened?  How it was their leader had developed a fatally flawed plan, briefed them – and they had all failed to check and challenge it – a plan that they had begun to execute, that could – without any exaggeration – have killed them all?’ I looked around the group, ‘This gentlemen is the leadership training environment we take your men into every day, and the environment in which we ask them to make plans, present their brief, challenge and execute well.   This is the training that you are asking me to deliver more cheaply.  I looked into the senior man’s eyes.