Featured Narrative: Logan Bennett, President of the Alberta Avalanche Rescue Dog Association, Director of the Canadian Avalanche Rescue Dog Association, and Avalanche Forecaster/Assistant Supervisor of Snow Safety at Sunshine Village Ski Resort
It was a big avalanche, it was size 2, big enough to bury a person. And it had totally surprised me.
When buried under snow, human scent emanates as a “cone-like feature” Logan Bennet tells me. Ferra’s job is to locate that cone. And then start digging. Golden-hued and small for a German shepherd, Ferra is Logan’s partner in their work of avalanche rescue, mobilizing to search for buried skiers after an unexpected avalanche. When they’re not searching, Logan works as an avalanche forecaster and is the assistant supervisor of snow safety at Sunshine Village ski resort in the Canadian Rockies. Working primarily in avalanche mitigation, he creates controlled avalanches to make the slopes safer for skiers.
Using a technique called ski cutting, Logan will “weight the slope” with his own body, skiing across the terrain, deliberately causing it to release and creating an avalanche. Avalanches are classified as sizes 1 to 5 and those that Logan creates with ski cutting go up to 1.5 and are “not harmful to humans.” Size 2, however, will bury a person. And on a routine day of ski cutting, after working a slope for hours, preparing it for a controlled release, Logan was fighting to stay upright as a size 2 avalanche took him down a mountain. Had he been buried, his own dog, Ferra, would have been used to search for him.
The first time Logan Bennett was on skis, he fell in love. Seven years old, his dad took him out on the slopes of their native New Zealand, and he became enamored, hook, line, and sinker. When he went off to college at Canterbury University, it was to study geology, and he kept himself on the slopes working as a part-time ski patroller at Temple Basin lodge, delivering first aid to injured skiers. But after a close friend committed suicide, Logan reevaluated his career path in geology and decided to go full-time as a ski patroller. He knew, “I just wanted to ski; that’s all I ever wanted to do.” The day he was caught in a size 2 avalanche, he’d been doing avalanche mitigation work since 1998. Almost 20 years.
“Snow,” Logan explains, is “basically made up of layers, and you’ll often have a layer that’s more problematic.” It’s those weaker layers, “under the snow, that the avalanche can release on,” he says. Logan and his partner had gone out to open and prepare a slope for skiers. It was one that Logan personally loved, “a really great area” that he frequently skied, and he “really wanted to open it for everyone else.” Opening this particular area was tricky. The challenge was the “very fine line” between leaving enough snow on the slope, particularly in the tightest part of the chute, and being able to “mitigate the hazard, in other words, cause the avalanche, but not so that it would ruin where we ski.” So he and his partner went about “working the terrain,” ski cutting while moving quickly and carefully between designated safe areas on the slope, wanting to get the snow just right. And he thought they had.
Had things gone as planned that day, only the slope on the far side would have released, and both Logan and his partner would have been well out of harm’s way. But as Logan crossed over the slope to confirm that the far side was gone, he twisted around to signal to his partner and felt the entirety of what was beneath him start to move. Still carrying forward on his skis, he looked up to see the crown wall, about 80 feet above. The huge slab of snow that he was on had separated and broken free. An avalanche had initiated.
Fighting to stay on his feet, he was being taken down the mountain. The slab of snow had released at a weakened layer, all the way at “the bottom of the snow pack,” and it was moving with increasing speed. There were pieces breaking off above, at the crown wall, raining down on him. And even though he was “still traversing at this point quite quickly” he was looking for a way out, looking for safety. And that’s when he saw the tree. Diving and throwing himself onto it, he “clung to it quite heavily” as the avalanche continued and the entire slab of snow between him and the crown wall slid down the mountain, going through mature timber. To this day, he gives thanks to that tree “every time” he goes by.
When the avalanche was over, Logan immediately looked for his partner. Glancing over at the safe spot where he’d last been standing, Logan saw that he was no longer there. Calling on the radio yielded nothing and so, “quite worried,” Logan set out to go look for him. And then he heard his partner’s voice on the radio. The avalanche “had gone much wider than both of us had anticipated it could go, and much, much deeper,” Logan says. Despite having been standing on a safe point, his partner had been swept off his feet. And pulled into the avalanche. It was a small tree that saved him, grabbing it as the snow dragged him by, swinging himself up and out of the avalanche as it barreled down the slope.
In the world of avalanche mitigation and snow science, there is a term for the “tendency to ignore people who don’t have as much experience.” It’s called a “halo bias,” Logan tells me. And he seems determined to avoid it. Despite his tremendous depth and breadth of experience and the “really humbling thing” of being caught unawares, and despite the comfort of knowing that he was surrounded by top-notch avalanche professionals who would be immediately dispatched if the situation were to become “really dire,” Logan insists that the most important element of what happened that day is what transpired immediately afterward. After checking each other for injuries, he and his partner went back to the office and Logan convened the entire team, including his boss. He wanted to know two things: what had happened and why.
Snow science is not exact. Certainty is not possible. But on reflection, there were things that had been ignored. First, there had been a temperature spike that probably made the slab of snow more likely to be triggered. And, although Logan hadn’t seen them, there had been other avalanches reported that day below tree line. And then there was his own desire to open the terrain and the fact that he was intimately acquainted with having “worked it a lot in the last 15 years.” He was confident that he was making the right choice.
Hindsight may provide a type of clarity that is impossible to achieve real time, but Logan insists on looking back to see what he can learn for the future. And he wants to do it openly with his team so that they, too, will feel comfortable discussing their mistakes and then sharing that information with other avalanche professionals in the industry. Despite his vast experience, Logan understands that he is both leader and learner, that “no one is infallible,” and that no one person can possibly have all the answers. To that end, he is committed to creating an environment where team members feel free to speak their mind, to share their ideas. He believes that this input from others makes him more “robust” as a leader, makes him better. He calls it “being supple and being ready to entertain other people’s ideas.” I ask him how leaders keep themselves open to other opinions when they already have so much experience and expertise to support their own thinking. Without hesitation, he says, “People who come in without any experience, they have one thing you don’t have: They don’t have your perspective.” And when he and Ferra have been tasked to search for buried skiers after an unanticipated avalanche, it is this, the very presence of others’ opinions, that gives him more confidence, not less, in the enormous responsibility of his search work with his dog.
Avalanche rescue, like snow science, is full of uncertainty. Sometimes people have been reported missing, and other times, it’s Logan and Ferra, out in the avalanche debris, working and searching, their job to clear an area, to report that no one has been left. Tasked by Alberta Parks, Parks Canada, or, on occasion, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the canine-human unit of two is mobilized after the avalanche. Ideally, people who travel in avalanche terrain wear transceivers, but that’s not always the case. And the next best thing, in Logan’s opinion, is a dog’s ability to search for scent. It requires that they work independently and in tandem with one another, flawlessly communicating, she searching and indicating to him, he watching and reading her. “It’s important,” Logan says, “that you have a really intimate relationship with your dog.”
Arriving at a scene, Logan tries to locate a transceiver signal and Ferra tries to locate a scent. When she starts running in a pattern across the avalanche debris, Logan begins to watch her. Running through a scent, she’ll catch it initially and then turn around to come back to it. In and out, in and out. A zigzagging Ferra gets Logan’s attention; it means she’s honing in on the scent cone. When she begins to aggressively dig, Logan will join her to probe for a subject. Digging is indicating. It means that spot, that very point “is the emanation of the scent from the snow.”
They trained for two-and-a-half years together, for this, their work on the slopes of the Canadian Rockies, training with the search organization, the Canadian Avalanche Rescue Dog Association (CARDA), and then going for certification with the Royal Mounted Canadian Police, the validating body that certifies that they are prepared and able to do this work, every day, unfailingly. The work of training meant giving Ferra the skills of searching. It meant attending multiple, intensive spring and winter courses together, of teaching her, at the beginning, to search for him hiding with a piece of fabric in his hands to then searching for a piece of human-scented fabric buried under snow. Progress is made in increments. Things get harder. The fabric is buried deeper, in a bigger area. Dogs have to find it in less time. There are always setbacks. And, in the end, after more than two years of training, some dogs are not able to make the “mental leap” from searching for a live person to searching for a piece of fabric. Logan has seen instances where dogs and their handlers get “to these really critical stages” and the dog is unable to make the transition. There are mentors from CARDA available for the problems that will undoubtedly arise. On the day of the exam, buried 70 to 75 cm deep, somewhere in a 100-meter × 100-meter square on a slope, were three or four pieces of fabric with human scent on them. Logan did not know where they were. Ferra had to find them. Within 45 minutes.
But in addition to teaching Ferra to search, Logan had to teach himself about Ferra. He had to see and understand his dog. How did she best learn? How much training was too much before she’d tire? Or get bored? What would keep her so interested and excited that she’d keep going, keep searching for the fabric, keep working? His retired search dog Cai was able to tolerate training every day. Ferra had a different temperament, softer. And Logan knew that if he pushed her too hard, if he forced her to do more than she was ready to do, she would wilt. Despite always doing what he’s asked of her, Logan has never “asked her to do something she’s super-uncomfortable with.” And when he introduces her to a new environment, one that will be challenging for her, he ensures that he does it “in a way with which that she won’t be too stressed about it, that she can do it.” They have built trust and understanding across the boundary of species. Logan knows that when the stakes are at their highest, Ferra is capable of finding someone buried in the snow. And Ferra knows that Logan will ask her to learn and to work, but he will not push her to her detriment. Even still, with all the training hours the two have logged, with a partnership built solidly on a foundation of trust, and with being tested, the two of them, repeatedly, under duress, there is still more to understand and to learn. There is the skill, yes, and the practice, but there is also the fundamental desire to continue to strengthen his relationship with the partner he also refers to as his best friend. “Getting to know your dog is really a journey in itself,” Logan says.
And yet, despite the intensive training with Ferra and returning for certification every year to stay at “peak level,” even with mentorship, and the years of experience, there remains the tremendous weight of responsibility in an avalanche search, to say that no one has been left, and making that call as accurately as possible while minimizing time on the slopes and the risk to the rescue teams. There is the stress of the “what if” scenarios that run through Logan’s mind. What if the scent conditions were bad? What if someone is buried? Left?
Ski cutting mitigates avalanche risk. And there are two elements of leadership that seem to mitigate the fears and pressures likely intrinsic to that work. First, Logan is committed to self-mastery, to “never stop learning.” And he is equally dedicated to being an evergreen student with Ferra. “I’m constantly learning on the things that I can improve with my dog to make her better and us a better team,” he says. The sharper his ability to read her and receive what she is communicating, the stronger they are together. And even though he is the president of the Alberta Avalanche Rescue Dog Association, the fundraising and outfitting organization for handlers and their dogs for the entire province, Logan is resolute in his own search: to know and digest more, to always be improving.
Second, he relies on, and has confidence in, the team of avalanche professionals that he has built and nurtured. He knows that when decisions are being made to put teams on the slopes after an avalanche, when circumstances dictate the very highest level of expertise of everyone in the room, Logan’s got it. And his team knows that if any one of them thinks that an unproductive search might have missed something, they’ll go back out. They know that, in Logan’s words, “no opinion is invalid.” Under these, the highest of stakes, he knows that he has the best thinking and experience in the room, and that his is, literally, an informed decision.
Featured Narrative: Brad Wilson, President and CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina
If you look at any revolution that’s ever occurred in history, when the revolution happens, there’s fear, there’s uncertainty, there are voids that need to be filled . . . and guess who fills them? Leaders.
Brad Wilson of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina has been steering the eight-billion-dollar insurance organization through the tumult of U.S. health care since he became its CEO in 2010. A liberal arts major, his path to the top might be called unusual. He doesn’t have an MBA and instead holds a JD and a graduate degree in liberal studies. When he talks about leading through uncertainty, he quotes Napoleon. And his advice to young people aspiring to carve a similar ascension to CEO? Become a Renaissance person.
Sometime during the third grade, Brad Wilson discovered biographies and in so doing, inadvertently began his education as CEO, one that he would return to and rely on over and over again. But that was to come much later. His boyhood interest in history followed him to college at Appalachian State University in the mountains of North Carolina, where he made it his major, and philosophy his minor. From there, it was on to law school at Wake Forest University, a route inspired, in many ways, by all the biographies he’d digested. So many of those people had been lawyers, and it was a career that, in Brad’s estimation, positioned them to “make a positive contribution,” no matter what they did.
While he was soaking up the pages of history during his early years, he was also absorbing the lessons imparted by his father and high school football coach, two men who would shape his development and who “contributed in an extraordinary way to the grounding” that Brad describes as both bedrock and guide for how he leads himself and his organization. His father showed him what it was to use one’s talents and abilities to live in such a way as to “make life better, for somebody, somewhere.” It was instruction by action, rather than mere words, and Brad says that he “could see it” in how his father lived his own life. Of his high school football coach, Brad says, “He taught me that I could always perform better than I thought, that I could play above my ability.” One man showed him how to use his capabilities in the world, the other showed him what it was to stretch beyond them. Both he credits with instilling the fundamentals of right and wrong, the beliefs about how one should live and behave, and, ultimately, about who one is. And both taught him how to lose.
I wonder how this knowledge of history combines with the lessons from his childhood to influence Brad in the present day. It seems that as much as he is a student of historical events, Brad is also a student of the leaders who shaped them. He’s spent time considering their common behaviors and processes, particularly under difficult circumstances. He’s tried to, as he describes it, “distill out the lessons that can be applied universally” to what he’s facing in the here and now, lessons about character, about inspiring followers, about carrying the burdens of leadership and the pressures of making difficult decisions, and about the role of leadership, itself.
“Every leader faces complex situations, but it’s not like Harry Truman having to decide whether or not and when to drop the atomic bomb on Japan,” Brad tells me. We’ve been talking about the context that history lends itself to, to the perspective that it gives him in the midst of leading through the high stakes of change and tumult. U.S. health care has been undergoing a transformation, Brad explains, and with the signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, “An emerging revolution was accelerated.” With it, so, too, was uncertainty and the critical importance of leading himself and his organization through it. He does not shy away from the challenges of complexity or making decisions under those conditions, but history has granted him a vantage point to crisis and challenge that has enabled him to develop a resilience and perspective for evaluating the most complex situations. Reflecting on the past, he says, “When you think the burdens that you are carrying are too heavy for you to bear, remembering that there have been many others that have had far more complex circumstances, kind of helps you keep your head about you.” And it is from here, looking through this lens, that Brad is able to draw on the tools he’s come to understand that make for skilled decision-making.
History tells him the importance of setting priorities and setting them in order. But history also reveals that “life is not linear, that it’s very complex and that you need to listen and look broadly, you need to be deliberate and not rush to judgment,” he says. He knows that even when the pressure is on, even when the challenge great, perhaps even more so during those circumstances, “The prism of decision-making needs to be turned many times in all of the angles of light.” Change and uncertainty might be accelerating, but decisions, Brad has come to understand, must be well considered. So how does he not rush to judgment when the challenge is great and the stakes high? For one, he’s constructed a “24-hour rule” that he invokes whenever possible, one where he self-imposes a moratorium on making a final decision. There are situations when even 24 hours cannot be reserved for further deliberation so immediate is the decision, but whenever it is available to him, Brad doesn’t “take any action for at least 24 hours.” Rarely, he says, is there a major course correction on an original decision, but sometimes, there is a “ten-fifteen degree dial right or left.”
He also knows that before he ever gets to the final stage of a decision, the light dispersed through that prism contains the full spectrum of opinion from colleagues around him. Like Logan Bennett, Brad is committed to getting all available information from his team and knows that it ultimately makes him better at what he does, better for Blue Cross. He recalls that great historical figures like Lincoln deliberately built their cabinets to include dissenting voices. And Brad doesn’t want “just a little bit” of opinion and dissent, he emphasizes, he wants it all, and in an “unvarnished way.” But fully eliciting it was considerably more difficult than he originally thought when he became CEO. In fact, it almost escaped him.
After law school, Brad served in Governor Jim Hunt’s administration as his general counsel. And, later, he walked through the doors of Blue Cross Blue Shield to work there in the same capacity. Then, promoted from within Blue Cross, he rose to CEO from among a team that was already in place, already functioning well. And he assumed that just because he was in a different seat, the “clarity of dissent” he’d receive wouldn’t change. He was the same person, after all, and these were his colleagues with whom he’d always shared the free flow of information. But he was mistaken. His seat made all the difference. Sitting at the head of the table, it turned out, “had a larger impact that I would ever have anticipated,” Brad remembers. He came to understand that he not only had to reassure his colleagues that he wanted their dissent, he also had to demonstrate it. “Because of the mantle of your authority, you can shut down the conversation or you can turn the spigot down so that what you’re getting is a trickle rather than the full flood of information,” he stresses. He had to do more than give permission for dissent, he had to give the clear message that it was expected, even rewarded. Emphasizing the importance of creating a “safe environment,” one in which people feel free and comfortable to speak up, Brad explains that his own behavior was one of the key building blocks for that container, highlighting the importance of “being self-aware, trying to be steady, not overreact.” In other words, his ability to lead others was contingent upon his skill at leading himself.
No matter how helpful the lessons of the past for leading his organization, or how much he might wish to apply them, they would all be for naught if Brad were unable to first lead himself. If he were not committed to self-mastery, to continuing to stretch and constantly improve, he likely wouldn’t be as effective or able to execute, as able to guide Blue Cross through the choppy waters and into the future with success. He is unequivocal: “You can’t have positive business results without effective leadership.” But he also knows that equally important, and an integral part of leadership’s self-mastery, is not just the outward stretch toward more knowledge and learning but also the inner knowing of when he’s stretched too thin, himself.
It’s no secret that the pressures of executive leadership are none too gentle, the situations incredibly complex and challenging, the decisions high stakes. How does Brad steer himself under those circumstances, I want to know? How does he self-lead within that vice grip? He shares that there are times when he’s found himself having “drifted away” from what he knows is his bedrock foundation, those values and guiding principles instilled in his youth. He’s experienced “feeling alone or out of control” in leadership’s ocean, he says. But he knows how to find his way back to shore, to that solid foundation instilled during his youth. And in addition to the team that surrounds him, the one that he’s deliberately imbued with the mandate to, what he calls, “speak truth to power,” he relies on his wife of 40 years and good friends to help him recognize when he might be off-kilter. When he finds himself pulled ever farther from himself, he draws on an assemblage of internal resources to get himself “righted,” as he describes it.
The very first thing he does is nothing. Externally, if at all possible, he invokes his 24-hour rule, slowing a final decision, buying time, he says, to “sleep on it.” And internally, within himself, he slows things, as well. Enunciating slowly and with great emphasis, Brad tells me that “quiet time alone” is his first go-to for righting himself. He steps away from the “clutter of the moment,” from its cacophony, to seek space and “time for reflection,” a place he describes as somewhere where one “can literally, mentally and physically, settle your emotions, your well-being.” From this place of solitude and quiet, Brad says he is able to gather his thoughts and return to being “centered and grounded.” From this firm footing, he is then able to make decisions with the clarity of his guiding principles. From this place of solidity, he knows that if he does turn the decision dial post-moratorium, it is calibrated against the knowing of what he believes, the foundation of right and wrong established as a boy, learned from watching his father.
That fundamental bedrock is also what informs his approach to leading his many “colleagues,” as he calls the employees of Blue Cross. We’ve been talking about staying connected to employees and staying in front of them, about keeping his door open and being accessible. I want to know how he reconciles the time required to run his organization with his desire to cultivate real relationships with his employees. Like anything that’s important, “You have to make it a priority,” Brad explains. And once it’s been made a priority, then it has to be carried out, action must be taken. It is here during our conversation, when we talk about how he relates to and leads the employees of Blue Cross, that he uses words like authenticity, vulnerability, and empathy. And talks about transparency, and not always having the answers. He describes the “Listening Tours” that he initiated to get in front of more employees, more often, traveling across the organization and country to different sites. There’s no agenda for the block of 90 minutes; he has an open dialogue with whoever has signed up to attend. Attendance is capped at 30 for each session on the Tour, and officers of the company are not permitted to sign up. This is an opportunity for Brad to talk with employees at the front lines of the organization, and they to him. “Nothing’s off limits,” he says. After an initial 10 minutes of comments, he opens it up and “the floor is theirs.” He may not have all the answers but is clear about one thing, and that’s how he’s going to show up: “It needs to be done authentically and genuinely. This is not a performance. It’s a relationship,” he says with certainty.
Not surprisingly, toward the end of our interview, as Brad looks back on the whole of his life and leadership experience to share his best advice gleaned from it, he again stresses the importance of creating relationships. Initially, when he proposes that a leader must be a “people person,” I think he might be talking about the need to be gregarious or friendly, even. But as he fills in this description, I begin to see that the picture he’s painting is one of a leader who retains a never-ending spirit of curiosity, however high the ascension. His suggestion? “All the time, in every walk of life, just simply get to know and learn from every person that you meet and continue to do that regardless of your vocation, station in life, title, family circumstance,” he says. As he shares this wisdom, I wonder if he isn’t simultaneously describing what lies at the heart of a Renaissance person as well as a leader who chooses the path of an ongoing quest for self-mastery: the essential belief that learning is infinite, as are its sources. And, I wonder, too, if that belief isn’t best exemplified in Brad’s simple but deeply held conviction that “there is a reservoir of knowledge and information and character everywhere.”