Footprints on the Mountainside

Wide Aware is happy to announce its first training and development blog carnival. This is intended to be an ongoing effort to engage in an exploration of different perspectives and insights related with training and development.

The first edition of the carnival is on, and you can read about it here.

Children naturally enjoy the outdoors. Apart from exercise, and health, adventure education helps children develop natural resilience from experience. Learning through experience is a natural state of being for a child, and while imparting information and training is necessary, it is important that a child gets to explore the world on his or her own terms, learning to cope with consequences or celebrate them from personal experience.

A young girl on one of my camps was rapt with attention during the introductory rappelling session. She came up with this exact question “Do soldiers use these same tactical rappelling techniques?” Tactical rappelling techniques!!! I had never considered this term before.

Another child from the same session asked “Why do we call abseiling rappelling?”

The questions in themselves are not particularly significant. No particular knowledge is involved, and knowing those particular answers is not going to change anyone’s life.

What I found satisfying about them was that “my kids” had stopped simply swallowing information, and were now exploring it.

The whole Karjat, Neral area is so lush green and totally enchanting this time. I just spent a weekend there. I’d gone to Dr. Modi’s Health Resort to attend the ISABS Umang Party and generally get in touch with the community, and then Raka and I took off to a friend’s bungalow in Neral.

Driving around the place, I realized how far it has come from the time I had begun trekking in this region. New resorts in Karjat seem to have sprung up every where and this area and Neral and Matheran seem to have become the most popular picnic spot near Mumbai. Crowds of tourists that look like friends, families and even corporate groups can be seen in the waterfalls around Karjat, generally having a great time.

Its a loooong way from how we guys were considered odd because we wanted to head out to this region in the monsoons. Of course, our world was mostly roughing it out, hikes, staying in caves….. Photography in particular used to be considered an expensive hobby. None of us had really thought of photographs beyond memories of our trip.

As “Mumbai picnic spots” go, it is a whole new world. Nature resorts near Mumbai are a growing trend, both in availability as well as demand. Quick, clean service, lovely ambiance and a whole new attitude of “back to nature” is a far cry from the rural mentality of pride in simplicity and basic accommodation with few facilities. While I miss the good old days and the charm of life in the mountains, I see this as an evolution in the mindsets of the Mumbai crowd, where pleasure in the outdoors is becoming more and more accessible, inviting and desired for the less adventurous.

Once more, it was Raka, me and our trusted bike, out in the mountains wandering to our hearts content, remembering the good old days and welcoming the change.

There seems to be an impression floating around in companies that serious training happens indoors, and outbounds are for having fun.

While ther is nothing wrong with having fun in the outdoors, I find it disturbing to see such programmes called training programmes.

Somewhere, I find that this reinforces an unconscious desire in participants to resist change and is harmful for the overall learning environment of the organization. Most of the outbound training enquiries I get focus on the “activities”. The more exciting, the better, the more exotic, the more adventurous, the more…. something-or-the-other. Pursuit of adventure is fabulous. I make money from it. But why wrap it up as a self-development programme or management training?

From a very simple angle, you get to save money from the trainer’s fees as well as training session time to invest fully into the desired adventure experience. From a deeper angle, there is no pretense - there is a certain honesty to going after what is really desired.

I suspect some of this is about “We have a training budget….” as an HR professional had candidly explained to me. Stated almost directly in that conversation was the objective that they wish to utilize the training budget so that it doesn’t get cut down, but they really don’t have any training in mind at the moment.

What I find telling in this is the inability to see beyond fixed concepts. This is a rigidity in perspective that is only manifesting itself with me in this way in the first fifteen minutes of conversation. What is this rigidity doing everyday, to the person, to the people who are influenced by their choices and to the organization?

How do I see this rigidity? I see it when an entire document about training is read and the important issues for discussion are about travel, accommodation, activities and food. I see it when outbound training becomes a way of organizing an outing under training budgets. I see it when there isn’t the least curiosity about if an outbound training programme is a new service called thus to provide that utility of training budget, or if it really has any value to deliver.

Of course, not all companies are like that. I have conducted programmes where participants on the outbound actually needed to be told to lighten up and go with the flow, because they were so focussed on learning, that they were almost unable to “be”.

And I have found the perfect participants as well - people who had arrived with full knowledge that they were out on training, and knew that they would be spending time in the outdoors and were fine with seeing what happened with the flow.

Why do I call these the perfect participants? Because they are utilizing their value for money, because they are investing their time actively and because it brings me a glow of pride in being able to work with them, to see their transformations and celebrate being a part of it. It brings me a high to see the changes being wrought still alive in participants when I meet them on some future programme….

It brings me the joy of having companions along on a journey of discovery, and I find few things that are headier than that.

I have heard news that treks to the Kalindikhal now have new permission rules. This is unverified information from Ramesh Rawat, who handles our treks in the region, but the scene seems to be:

• All trekking groups must carry a satellite phone with them.
• Participants must go through a fitness test
• Porterage rates have been hiked
• Horses aren’t going on the route

This makes life difficult, as we have a group heading there in July, and these new developments haven’t been budgeted for. While I was not able to find any announcements on the net, the news seems pretty certain, as the one source we have has been reiable.

The horses bit probably comes from the waist deep snow at the pass, and might change when the pass opens completely for the summer. At the moment, our guide’s assessment is that it would be okay for us to go, but not clients. Unfortunately, its the clients with the plans.

We do know that one group has returned from the route successfully, but with an extremely difficult experience.

So here  I am wondering if my group will go to Kalindikhal, or Damdhar kandi, or somewhere else completely. Time is running short, and there are decisions to make.

If, by any chance, you have been to Kalindikhal recently, or know of the exact new permissions in place, do drop me a line in the comments. Any information you could provide would be helpful.

If you have arrived here looking for information, stay tuned. I am in the process of communicating with authorities, and will be posting updates as I find them here.