Project leader: Audun Hetland (UiT, The Arctic University of Norway)
Project duration: 2021-2024
Participating countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany and USA
Funding from NordForsk: 15 MIO NOK
Project website: CARE | UiT
Making sound decisions under uncertainty in a rapidly changing world is more important than ever. The GUESSED project used avalanche terrain as a test-bed for developing theories and tools – which will have an impact far beyond the snow-covered mountains in the Nordic Countries. The GUESSED project aimed to reduce the loss of life from decision errors by improving the theory and practice of decision making in uncertain hazardous environments of non-representative feedback.
Impact story
The GUESSED project demonstrated that non-experts cannot be expected to make expert-level decisions in avalanche terrain. Even seasoned avalanche professionals cannot make reliable judgments on “day one” of a new snowpack—they need time to gather observations, exchange information, and interpret emerging patterns. Recognizing this, the project shifted focus from improving individual decision tools toward building collective structures that make expert knowledge more accessible and operational for both professionals and the wider public.
Through close collaboration between researchers, the national avalanche warning service (NVE), local guide companies, municipalities, and the tourism sector, the project developed and tested an integrated system for transforming expert assessments into concrete, actionable travel advice.
Key Findings
The GUESSED project has fundamentally advanced our understanding of how people make risk decisions in high-uncertainty environments. Initially, the project set out to evaluate heuristic decision tools—specifically Fast-and-Frugal Trees (FFTs)—as potential aids for avalanche decision making. However, extensive collaboration and fieldwork with international avalanche experts revealed that such decisions cannot be reduced to simplified, rule-based heuristics. Expert assessments depend on context-sensitive interpretation, iterative information gathering, and experience-based pattern recognition that evolve dynamically over time.
This insight led to a major conceptual shift: avalanche risk decisions are not best understood as a series of discrete choices, but as continuous sensemaking processes. By reframing decision making in this way, the project bridged behavioural science, cognitive psychology, and geoscience, contributing to broader decision theory on how expertise operates in “wicked” learning environments—contexts marked by uncertainty, feedback delays, and incomplete information.
The project also identified striking differences between experts and non-experts. Non-experts typically received little feedback on their decisions, limiting learning and skill development. A multi-season field study showed that non-experts rarely updated their plans, often maintained static intentions, and were sometimes unaware of the prevailing avalanche hazard. In contrast, in-depth interviews with survivors of serious avalanche accidents—who had received direct, real-life feedback on flawed decisions—showed that many subsequently adopted more reflective, expert-like decision strategies.
Key outputs
The SkiGuide App serves as the public interface of this system. It presents more than 500 mapped ski tours across Norway, each with a terrain exposure score indicating inherent risk. However, terrain ratings alone do not capture the current avalanche conditions. To address this, the app is designed to integrate with insights from the daily Guide Meetings in the Lyngen region.
Online guide meetings gather inbound and local guides and the national avalanche warning service (NVE), observers to share field observations and jointly interpret the current avalanche situation.
Drawing on insights from longitudinal studies of expert decision making, the project worked with national education providers to propose updated learning goals for avalanche training in Norway. These emphasize adaptive expertise, reflective practice, and learning from feedback - aligning education with how real-world decision making actually develops.
The project initiated an International network on teaching human factors in avalanche education. Following the world’s largest conference on snow and avalanche decision making (ISSW Tromsø 2024), GUESSED convened two workshops bringing together 117 leading international educators and researchers and decision makers in avalanche education from all over the world.