What can rock climbing teach us about project risk management?
As my long-suffering colleagues, family, and friends will attest, I like climbing, and I like talking about climbing. 1 Some lovely rocks for climbing on - Sennen, Cornwall. I'm definitely not alone in being an engineer who climbs - perhaps it's the attraction of the shiny metalwork, the fact that it has standards against which success can be measured, or the chance to get outdoors after a long week at work. I'd wager that the feeling of competence has something to do with it as well - climbing has skills that can be learned. Once you've learned those skills and become competent, you can use them to wow non-climbers, demonstrating skill in a way that impresses people. That immediate competence feedback isn't always available in work projects that can last months or years, and sometimes the most difficult element of engineering in a project goes unnoticed by the client, while they're wowed by the box you put it in. This might g...