Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Very excited to have with me, Alan Mallory. He’s an Everest Mountain climber, an engineer by trade with also a master’s in psychology. I’m looking forward to a very exciting conversation today. Allan, maybe tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to Mount Everest.

Sure. Well, it’s a pleasure to be on the show, Eric. I’m an engineer by trade. I have a technical background, but I grew up in a very adventurous family, and my father really got us into a lot of outdoor activities and adventure activities from a young age. We did a lot of whitewater canoe trips and winter camping and that thing. He actually got my siblings and I into mountaineering as well. When each of us were 19, he took us to climb one of the seven summits, the highest mountains on each of the seven continents. In my case, it was McKinley here, Denali. That was my introduction to it, and it was no cakewalk. That was a dangerous, difficult mountain as well. It takes two weeks to climb. And then this would have been about 2006 when we first started talking about Everest. And my father originally started those discussions, and the more I think, each of us looked into it, this is my brother’s sister and I, it became, what do I say, morphed into a personal dream, that thing. I like putting myself or doing things that prove to myself that I can. That’s the intrinsic motivation is all about.

And so that’s how the idea of Climbing Everest came together. We were two years in the planning beforehand. And then, of course, once the actual climbing begins, you’re climbing for two months straight. And it was a harrowing, exciting, yet crazy journey.

Tell me about some of the lessons you talk a lot about that and the connections to safety. Tell me a little bit about your experience reaching new heights, but also in terms of how it connects to safety and leading safety.

Sure. Well, it’s a relatively dangerous expedition. I mean, people die every year. There are three people died at camp four while we were there. And that’s the typical, even just on the south side. And some years are much worse. Now, a lot of the deaths, or I would say the majority of the deaths are human error when you look back. There have been natural disasters, and that’s when we’re doing risk management, you have to look at, well, what can you avoid? Then what can you transfer in terms of risk? We use an outfitter to do that. Replacing the tents and things that get destroyed, replenishing our food surprise, that thing. What can you mitigate? And then what’s left is what you’re accepting if you want to take on something like this. And these are those unknowns, like avalanches that can happen at any point. But having said that, I mean, most of the deaths are human error. Climbers that don’t take the planning seriously. They try to deviate too far from their schedule because they have that dream to reach the summit. And so when you’re functioning on a third mental capacity because of the of oxygen to your brain, you basically get what is an amygdala hijack, where your emotional side of you suppresses the rational to some degree, and so you make poor decisions. 

Sure. And we made mistakes as well. But I think the fact that the four of us there, we were able to run things by each other. And so, the risk management is a huge thing for Everest mountaineering. And it was particularly important in our expedition because we were an unguided team, it was even hard to find an outfitter that would support us because they didn’t know who we were and they’re trying to run their business.

There’s a bigger risk for them. Sure. They don’t know who you are.

We had a bit of a hybrid where we needed the logistical support from one of these larger outfitting groups, but we wanted to be in control when we climbed and when we didn’t and making our own decisions. We were able to find a few that were open to the negotiation, and that’s eventually what came to. And part of it was they wanted to have two of their Sherpas. They were local Nepalese climbers with us. So really, there were six of us. But they weren’t… We weren’t part of… Because they also had more of a structured group that was working together. And then there was us, which were our own team within this larger umbrella. And so why it was so important to us is because in a typical expedition on Mount Everest, you are transferring They’re offering all of the risk over to a guide because they’re making the decisions of when you climb and when you don’t and all of that. If they make a mistake, though, it’s your life. We wanted to be in control of that. That’s why it mattered so much in our case to understand the risks and so on, because we had to do the scheduling ourselves and figure out when we climbed and when we didn’t, and when we might be pushing too far into the altitude and risking getting cerebral or pulmonary edema, for example.

Anyway, so we had two years to try to research and figure that out. But it’s also very much, what would I call it, an agile project when you’re there. You’re having to learn from Every time you make a push into the altitude. But if you stay there, you run the onset of getting that acute mountain sickness, which leads to edema. So, you come back down and you’re informing your next iteration or next push into altitude by what you’ve learned. And so that’s a key aspect in safety, right? 

Yeah, absolutely. This continuous learning that you’re trying to build into your practices.

Sure. And from my engineering background, I’ve seen how that can really be problematic when people are so reliant, let’s say, on procedures and processes that they turn off the learning element of their mind, blindly follow the procedures. There’s obviously a place for procedures, so you have consistency, but you also have to be aware. That awareness in mountaineering is particularly important because it allows you to make those adjustments that are needed in order to be able to survive in such a volatile environment. Everything is just changing so quickly.

It’s interesting because when you talk about different guides, I’ve used many times a case study of a guide or even two guides that had gone many years ago up, and one of them in terms of the decision making, how they were trying to push to get to the summit and weren’t really looking at the skills and the capabilities on their team. It resulted in multiple fatalities, pretty serious outcomes. Flip side, though, is you have somebody who’s done it before, who’s bringing essentially the lessons learned and a lot of the safety rules are based on learnings of others who’ve gone some way. How did you compensate for some of those?

Well, I think that was the… How we compensated. I mean, I would say, why did we… I guess the question would be, why did we feel like we were competent enough to take on something like that? Because you make a good point. Someone who’s there all the time would certainly have their own… There’s a major benefit in that. We were combining the knowledge and skills and everything we’d learned on these other expeditions because each of us had… It’s not like we were going into this green and we didn’t have a mountaineering experience, but we didn’t have experience in the high altitude and the Himalayas in particular. That’s where I would say the knowledge and experience from the outfitting group that we were part of. We tried to, especially the lead of that in the years up before the climb, we tried to, what I say, extract as much information from his mind and experience as possible so that we could use that to inform our own decisions. You’d call that bringing in a subject matter expert when making decisions. Then also having those two Sherpas was at first it wasn’t clear that benefit, detriment, because it’s different culture, different language, a lot of different differences.

And now you’re trying to, in a relatively short time, build relationships that need to be deep enough that you’re putting your lives in each other’s care. Between my siblings and my father and I, we had that bond already established. But with our Sherpas, it wasn’t so much the case. But early on, we tried to break down those barriers between us and them. I would say how we did that was… I saw a lot of the other climbers there. They don’t particularly They treat the Sherpas very well. A lot of climbers tend to be people who’ve reached the upper echelon of whatever sphere they’re in, businesspeople, that thing. Everest is almost hardwired in us to reach the top of whatever endeavor we’re in. And so, they’re used to pretty good service. I don’t know. I just saw that treating the servants, that thing. And we tried not to do that. We tried to… When What we were involved in, even at some of the… At one point, we had to go down below base camp to one of the little villages, and we were playing pool and cards and telling jokes. And it was like the six of us.

We really built a good relationship. We tried not to have it be us and them. Because they want to reach the summit as much as we do. If you’re a Sherpa and your resume doesn’t say summit, you’re not nearly as marketable. It’s critical. And many of, I would say most have I’ve never been to the summit. Because there’s a lot of Sherpas working behind the scenes and only one or two would be those high altars.

I see. They go all the way to the top.

Yeah. And the success ratio when we were there was only 29% historically. So, 70 % of clients are turning back. And so that means if you’re a Sherpa, you only have the chance of making it one every three years. And so that’s that relationship with them. And so, they weren’t really involved in… We would run things by them, is how I would say it, and really respect. They’ve been up there before. I can think of a few times when they really did have a really good insight. When we were on their way back down from the summit, we’d been climbing for about 30 hours straight right through the night, and we’re delirious. We’ve got the altitude problems. We just gotten down the Hillary Step section, which is a rocky, pretty treacherous area. And there was a little plateau, and I was just so exhausted and tired. And I thought, well, I’m just going to flop over on my side here for a second and just rest for a few seconds or maybe a minute. It seemed at the time like the logical thing to do. And I can remember Zangpo, one of our Sherpas. As soon as I did that, almost immediately, he was there.

He’s, I don’t recommend this. I don’t recommend this. And he was right, and I knew it was right. If you ever seen any of the Everest movies, everyone does that. They just end up there forever because your body just shuts down. But anyway, I just wanted. So, yeah, immediately we just forced ourselves to our feet and just kept going. If you keep moving, you stay alive. Or that’s the hope anyway. The percentage of summiteer’s that perish is actually relatively high. Overall, I think it was about two and a half % fatality.

And it’s much, much lower than it used to be. It’s gone much, much safer.

Yeah. And maybe that was, I think, when we were doing it. It’s probably even lower than that now. Yeah. So, it’s not… But anyway, that still makes it the most dangerous adventure activity when you compare it to scuba diving and sky diving and all of that stuff.

Some of the themes you talk about when you’re building rapport with Sherpa is what comes to mind is also creating psychological safety because you need a brother, sister, keeper. Somebody is looking out for you. And so really investing in making sure you have that relationship because we know that there’s been some examples. If I go to aviation where captain is flying the plane, they’re running out of fuel, first officer or a flight engineer realizes that there’s no fuel, doesn’t feel comfortable speaking up in that environment. Whereas we know this is not a good outcome. If you have no more fuel, you need to do something. That psychological safety becomes so key if you want somebody to speak up at those key moments.

Yeah, no, and I can remember that example from aviation. Yeah, exactly. So, keep the communication. And there were some challenges there because they could speak English, but it was broken English. But a lot of times we’re using nonverbal cues to communicate well and rely a lot on that. And yeah, so I mean, we just became friends over the two-month period more than anything. And that was a major advantage. When you have friends, you look out, you do things for them and work together to make it a reality. Because for almost the entire two months, one or more of us was so sick or weak or, let’s say, cognitively not there, that the others had to step in and pick up the slack. So that was key.

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How do you manage this risk assessment on an agile basis? Because what you’re describing is you’re going to new areas that you’ve never explored. It parallels from a mission standpoint. If you’re thinking about a lot of non-routine tasks and functions, there’s similar parallels where you’re going to an area that’s uncharted. Maybe there’s not necessarily the learnings to capture because you’re going alone. Tell me a little bit about how you did those risk assessments.

Yeah, well, I’ll talk about the iterative approach second. Beforehand, though, in the two years, that was just doing the research. When you haven’t been there, you’re going to have to just learn from those that have documented what they went through. We We’ve basically made a list, a register of what we’d be up against. We’re doing qualitative risk assessment here where we look at the relative impact and likelihood. If the relative impact is high or catastrophic in the case of death, that’s where you have to focus your mitigation strategies. And so, for things like avalanches and areas that we knew were volatile, like the kombu icefall we have to go through, where there’s about 50 of these crevasses in the ice that are hundreds and hundreds of feet deep, and we’re crossing them on aluminum ladders, tight end-to-end. And you go through that section six times. How we would mitigate that section, for example, is by the time of day we would go through. The Kumbu Icefall moves at 4 to 6 feet per day. These huge chunks of ice that are basically a frozen waterfall you could think of as this glacier, the Western Kum glacier, breaks off between two mountain peaks.

And so, it’s just a rubble of ice, except some of these ice chunks are the size of apartment buildings. It’s volatile, it’s volatile. It’s dangerous. And on the south side of Everest, it’s claimed a lot of lives from falling, seracs, or what they call those ice avalanches or those ice chunks. And so, we would go through it. If we wake up at one o’clock in the morning, try to get through all the way or the majority of the way before the sun, even at the ice, because the majority of that movement of ice happen when the sun hits it and you get expansion of the ice. And so that’s a way that we’d call that a mitigation strategy. And we tried to have those types of mitigation strategies for a lot of the other risks, falling risks. Make sure you’re clipped in. Make sure you have some redundancy when possible and in place. So that’s the upfront, how we might approach it. So now you’ve got this… Once you reach base camp, 17,000 feet, now you’ve got to start doing an up and back approach. So that’s when you make the push through, you’re noting even the mistakes you make, right?

So that you can learn from it on the next go around. The first time we climbed through that Kumbu Icefall, we were 13 hours getting up to camp one, and we barely crawled in. I mean, we were just completely spent. And one of the mistakes we had made is we had some nice to haves in our pack. We thought, well, when you get to Camp 1, it’d be nice to have an extra pair of socks, an extra pair of long John’s. Things that at the time seemed logical. Well, we learned our lesson. If it’s not critical to your safety and success, eliminate it because you can’t have any extra weight going through there. And so that’s the type of thing. We make the adjustment. We just cleaned house and made sure we just had the bare minimum we needed for safety and success. And then the same goes for how we navigate and approach some of those. There’s lots of vertical ascents and vertical repels in the icefall as you’re clamoring over these huge ice seracs. And also, just the technique in crossing these ladders. Because over that two-month period of climbing, we’re probably crossing at least Well, we’re going through six times, so 300 ladders.

And so, we would learn, we would work together a little bit to try to… When there were the loose safety ropes, the person crossing, it doesn’t give you much leverage side to side. But if one person held the rope as tight as possible from the side, it gave the person crossing a little bit of stability in terms of back and forth. And so, we developed these strategies that made things safer. And that’s the key to an iterative approach, is you take the feedback and the real-world experience from the iteration you’re in, and then you use that to make adjustments. And the adjustments are the key, because just noticing it doesn’t do much. And a lot of organizations want to seem agile, and so they break things down into small little phases. If you’re not making adjustments, you’re not You lose the benefit of an agile approach, an iterative approach in particular.

Here you have the advantage of it sounds like, doing it then going back down. You learn and then you go in again. But in business, you don’t always have that opportunity to try something, go back, and then go for real.

Well, it depends on the approach you take. I mean, the idea… I’m very much an advocate of an agile approach. And so, when I work with organizations, often we’re trying to figure out how we can Incorporate iterations, even on a smaller scale. Maybe it’s a little prototype you can put up. Maybe it’s getting an idea or something you’re rolling in front of a small user group before you invest all the time and energy into developing the full product. That’s the idea of iteration when it comes to a business environment. 

Yeah, makes sense. Now, a lot of the themes, because you were going it alone with the Sherpas, obviously, the one thing you should have less is complacency, right? Because complacency is the risk when I’ve done it too many times, they start getting comfortable with a particular task or function, so my risk awareness starts diminishing. What’s the right balance, right? Because you experience is good. Having been there before is good, but then that complacency can set in. In this case, you had probably no complacency, probably heightened awareness risk.

No, I think complacency was still a major They’re a risk and challenge for us. If you talk about crossing those ladders, because we’re crossing so many, it becomes old hat. And I can recall even at times being, well, because it takes energy to grab the rope and clip in all of that. And I’d say, well, it’s a short little cross. Maybe I should just try it without the rope. And I’d have to catch myself and say, well, you better just clip in here because, well, you need something. Should something go awry? And so, I would say it’s not like you’re always faced with complacency. What I thought of complacency, I think it’s tied in some way to the way our minds categorize things to save mental computation power. This is actually how bias arises. We don’t have the cognitive capacity to fully process everything that we’re taking it through our five senses. What we do is we take a cursory glance; we attribute the characteristics, so we don’t have to mentally process it. It’s tremendously beneficial in saving, what would you call it, cognitive processing power for us because we just don’t have the ability.

That’s what the complacency is, I would say. And so, your mind’s always trying to do that. We simplify things, glance at the latter, look, let’s just automatically do what we did the last 50 times. And so, then it’s up to the rational side of your mind, I would say, to make that analysis and say, oh, no, I better just devote the cognitive Sure. Capacity here because otherwise it can run into challenges. I guess that’s a long way of just saying, well, you’re always faced with that challenge of complacency, and you almost have to be complacent in some things because otherwise you’ve used your limited capacity in thinking about them. In the ladder example, it might be, well, I don’t think much about the integrity of the snow before the ladder, because otherwise, if I spend too much time-wasting capacity in thinking about that, I won’t have the capacity with the ladder, something like that. It’s a balance.

You talk blind spots, essentially, in terms of where we start minimizing the information, making some shortcuts in terms of our decision making. As you said, I mean, our brain uses a huge amount of energy on a good day. You’re in an environment where there’s a lot less oxygen, which means your cognitive abilities also get diminished. A lot of the case studies where things went horribly wrong on Everest were around blind spots starting to set in, whether it’s overconfidence or a desire to reach the summit that starts… You start getting task focus on reaching the summit, even if there’s maybe changing conditions in front of you. Tell me a little bit about how you managed some of the blind spots in this environment.

Yeah. Well, because in the end, your approach ends up being a hybrid between that which you spent two years of laying out and developing. And so that might be what we call the processes that you’ve established and the evaluation of the real-world risks and challenges that are ahead of you. And getting that balance right, it’s hard to… It would be hard to come up with a rule-based approach to which one you should put more emphasis on because it’s in the moment you want to be making sure you’re considering both because either too much emphasis on one or the other can be fatal if you Would you just focus on the heat of the moment and ignore everything you’ve learned and studied, that’s led to all kinds of disasters and vice versa. So how did we make sure we noticed those blind spots? Some of that I would say, I don’t know if I can be hard to articulate it. I would say those teams that were successful, they had enough experience with other adventures and challenges in life that they naturally notice things before it was too late. In some ways, that’s also the… 

That’s how you build resilience. Our lifestyle was one of a lot of different adventures and challenges. Now, they weren’t the same as the challenges were faced on Everest. But when you’re trying to problem-solve or even notice risky situations, your mind thinks back, mostly subconsciously, and extrapolates from those ways that you solved other complex problems. Maybe it was winter camping or whitewater canoeing. It’s not the same as you’re faced in the moment, but you can extrapolate from that. That’s not something, per se, you can just learn in the moment. That’s just, you might say, the advantage, if we bring it back to the workplace, that’s the advantage of someone that has worked in in a dangerous industry for 10, 20 years, where they can, if they don’t allow themselves to become complacent about it, they have enough of those data points from the past that it brings it to their attention quickly.

Tell me a little bit about how you bring these stories of Everest to the workplace, because you talk on agile workplaces, you talk about safety. Obviously, here we’re really talking about Everest and the connections to safety. Tell me about how you help bring those connections with different audiences.

Yeah. Countering is an analogy for overcoming challenges in life or in work or business on the way to accomplishing something of value. It really is a great analogy for exactly that. And so that’s what I do when I do my programs. If you just do a program on the, let’s say, the safety aspects or the agile aspects, you see your audience glaze over, right? It could be a little bit dry. I found to keep it engaging and to be beneficial and so people can remember it, you have to tie it to some story or emotional incident that people can remember. And so that’s how I use my family’s Everest story. And it’s really quieted an emotional exciting story. And so, it keeps people captivated and drawn in. And there’s just so many parallels to the industry that in general, I use a short mountaineering example of why it’s important to empower people or maintain a future mindset or how we resolve conflicts. And then I bring in more of the technical aspects, graphs and things that people can apply in their own work. I think as humans, that’s how we learn. We learn when we can make an emotional connection to the story.

We remember, at least.

We remember it, yeah.

Yeah, that’s worked great. I don’t just bring in my mountaineering ventures. I went through my own mental health journey in my younger years. I have the engineering stories. And so, whatever is most applicable to the audience or the theme or what they’re trying to learn, that’s when I bring in those examples.

Thank you. Alan, you’ve got a book as well that you’ve published. Tell a little bit about your book.

Yeah, well, two of them now. My first one is just called The Family That Conquered Everest. It’s got sections from each of my other family members as well. And so, it’s quite a, let’s say, crazy adventure story with a lot of life lessons. But For folks, my new book, it’s called Summits of Self, the Seven Peaks of Personal Growth. And that one’s really more of a deep dive into yourself in psychology. There’s a psychological safety aspect to that. It really has a deep mental health focus. In my younger years, I had quite a severe social phobia and anxiety disorder, which is known as generalized anxiety disorder. And that plagued me for a lot of years. And what got me so interested in the human mind and psychology, all of that. And I would say surprisingly so, because my background is a technical background. It’s pretty odd that I would even and go down that psychological path. But I started studying the human mind and I started developing and reading about and developing my own strategies. And then some of them worked. Now, it took me a long time of trying different things, but Some of them were cognitive games, I would call them, of how I would think back to situations and rewrite the ending, view things in a different light, for example.

And they seem silly at first, but then I would notice when I would If I were to think of those situations, I wouldn’t have the same negative emotional response. Then I doubled down. I was excited and motivated to continue on that path. I still am. I just love reading about strategies and trying to better yourself in your mind. So that’s what that book is all about. I go through seven internal summits. The summit of self-motivation, the summit of self-resilience. And so, you got to like psychology a little bit and taking a deep dive into yourself. But I’d say on that book, I get more when I get emails or people that there’s feedback from folks. For me, I’ve just realized, well, this is pretty… I thought I was the only one that had these sorts of challenges with anxiety and so on. And the more I do programs in the mental space, the more I realize this is the internal summit that so many people struggle with, and you just don’t see it.

And if somebody wants to get in touch with you, if somebody wants you to come present or talk about any of these topics, specifically around safety, how can they do that?

Probably my website would be the best. I got lots of good information on there. It’s just allanmalary.com, A-L-A-N. There are a few different ways to spell Alan, but I’ve got a bunch of videos and things on there.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Alan. Really appreciate you coming on the show.

My pleasure. Thanks, Eric.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.