NEWS
Just before midnight on 31 July 2008, 29 mountain climbers started their ascent of the world’s second highest mountain, K2 (8,611 metres), on the border between Pakistan and China. Two days later 11 of them were dead, probably as a result of so-called summit fever: the participants were obsessed by their goal, and decided to continue despite the obvious risks.
"Summit-fever behaviour is easily transferred to ordinary organisations, which also have projects that can easily lead to tunnel vision: the employees only see the goal, not the risks — and few people have the courage to oppose. The decisions are seldom straightforward —they are often constructs after the event. - Markus Hällgren, Professor of Organisation Theory at Umeå University’s School of Business and Economics.
“It’s a kind of group pressure whereby conflicting opinions are not allowed, even if you can see that the goal is unrealistic. People continue climbing,and focus on the partial goal of getting to the top — but forget about getting back. We’re actually talking about non-decisions, which are in fact decisions of a sort,” says Markus Hällgren, Professor of Organisation Theory at Umeå University’s School of Business and Economics.
The K2 expedition forms part of the TripleED project, which Markus Hällgren is heading.In TripleED the research group is examining decision making and organisation in extreme environments, e.g. during mountain climbing or in emergency medical care.
“It’s very exciting studying the decisions made in this kind of environment. They actually involve the same mechanisms as in ordinary organisations, but everything becomes so much clearer in extreme contexts.
During spring 2013 Markus Hällgren and four research colleagues travelled to Nepal to join an expedition going up Mount Everest.
“For me it was the fulfilment of an old dream. We filmed and wrote up the various phases of what happened, and carried out structured interviews before, during and after the expedition,” says Markus Hällgren, though he suffered from altitude sickness at a height of 4,400 metres and had to turn round and go down. After a couple of days, however, he was on his feet again, and caught up. But he did not go with them to the summit — instead remaining at 6,000 metres.
“It’s too early to draw any conclusions from our material from Mount Everest, but one observation is the nature of the decision-making process involving leaders and participants: the participants come up with the decisions and look up to the experienced leaders, whilst the leaders shunt the decisions back to the participants.
Another interesting observation is the bureaucratisation of extreme issues — they are incredibly well organised. Yet it’s astounding that one allows totally unprepared people to go up mountains,” says Markus Hällgren.
Markus Hällgren and his colleagues are now sitting in their offices with over 1,000 closely written A4 pages, 200 hours of interview recordings and 30 hours of videos. It is a very substantial body of material that Markus and his research group have to go through.
“Yes, there’s quite a bit to be processed before we can draw any conclusions. And we will also be receiving data from emergency healthcare.The latter is another type of extreme environment where wrong decisions can also have fatal consequences.
Summit-fever behaviour is easily transferred to ordinary organisations, which also have projects that can easily lead to tunnel vision: the employees only see the goal, not the risks — and few people have the courage to oppose. The decisions are seldom straightforward — they are often constructs after the event.
“There’s much to be learned from our studies,” says Markus Hällgren. TripleED will be continuing until 2015, and before that the conclusions will be presented.
