Editorial Intent - What Is Your Wall Actually Saying?

Chapter four in a series on how to read, understand, manage, and optimise route setting - written for the people who run climbing walls.

Chapter three closed on a question: what if the difficulty of a route was never meant to be the creative decision at all - and your wall has been saying something you never intended? This chapter comes from Jérôme's side of the desk, and it takes that question at face value.

How a route usually begins

In most gyms, a route starts life as a number. Someone looks at the wall, counts what's coming down, and works out the gaps: two 6as, a 6b+, something for the kids' sessions, a couple of hard ones to keep the regulars quiet. The setter takes that list, picks up the holds, and then goes looking for something interesting to do inside each number, adjusting until the route feels like the grade it was asked to be.

Nothing about that is lazy. It's how most of us were taught to set. But look at the order of operations. The grade is the brief, and the experience is whatever creativity is left over once the number has been hit. The setter's best thinking goes into dressing up a target that was decided before they touched a hold.

Editorial intent flips that order. Start with what the climber should feel, learn or discover on this piece of wall. A slab that teaches someone, six months in, to trust their feet. A first dyno with a forgiving landing. A sequence that rewards patience over pulling harder. Set that, and the grade follows as a consequence. Across a whole reset, those consequences add up to a distribution, and if the experiences you proposed suit the people who actually climb with you, that distribution will match your customer group. Difficulty becomes a statistical outcome, not a creative target.

Forgotten, not refused

It would be easy to tell this as a story about setters looking down on commercial thinking. In Jérôme's experience, that isn't really what happened. Commercial instincts in setting were forgotten more than they were refused.

As climbing gyms grew into proper businesses, they picked up tools that already existed elsewhere: CRMs, booking systems, membership software, loyalty schemes. Those arrived ready-made from other industries, so adopting them was easy. Setting had nothing comparable to borrow, and no pressing reason to change. Walls were busy, routes got climbed, members renewed. There was some resistance from setters, but it was rarely deliberate. It was closer to "why change it if it works?" Because nothing forced the question, setting was simply left out when the rest of the industry got organised.

That's now changing. When margins tighten, the first things to get trimmed are the variable ones, and Jérôme has watched gyms in France cut hold budgets and skip setting days for exactly that reason. The moment you're deciding what setting can lose, you need to know what it is for.

Think like an editor

A magazine editor doesn't start an issue by commissioning three pieces at 1,200 words and two at 600. They decide what the issue is about and what the reader should come away with, and then they commission the stories that deliver it. Word count still matters. It decides the page count and the print bill, and the editor checks it at the end. But nobody buys a magazine for its word counts, and an editor who planned an issue by length alone would produce something nobody wanted to read.

Grades work the same way. They matter for planning, for safety and for the shape of the wall, and you should check them once the reset is done. They just shouldn't be the first decision. That's why we call this editorial intent.

What editorial intent actually asks

In practice, the question changes from "what grades are we filling?" to "what are we proposing on this section of wall?" The answer might be something like: this reset on the slab is about footwork, for the people who've been climbing six months and still pull with their arms. That's a management-level decision, not something to leave to whoever happens to be setting on the day. It's the brief from chapter two, taken one level deeper: the brief says what's needed, and editorial intent says why, and what the climber should take home from it.

More freedom, not more control

The obvious objection from setters is that this sounds like management wanting more say. In our experience it works the other way. Hitting a number is the least interesting part of the job. A setter told "make the slab about trusting your feet" has far more room to create than one told "6a+, blue holds, left of the arête". It also speeds up the day. Teams that know what they're proposing make decisions faster, and spend less time in the endless circular discussions that eat into setting time. The grade still gets checked, the way the editor checks the word count. It just stops being the thing the whole day is organised around.

The words we use shape what we set

There's one more piece, and Jérôme considers it the most important. The industry calls its product a route, or a problem. If gym managers and setters had grown up calling it a climbing experience instead, setters' behaviour over the long run would have been different. A route is an object: a line of holds with a number attached. An experience is something that happens to a person. The two words don't lead to the same creative process.

What's still missing is a shared vocabulary between management and setters for describing an experience: technical, playful, intimidating, flowing, powerful, balancy, and whatever else your wall is trying to say. Without those words, the only common language left is grades, so grades are what everyone ends up managing. We don't solve that here. It's a thread this series will keep pulling, because it's the same language your customers will need too.

The one idea to take away

Difficulty isn't the creative decision - it's the statistic that falls out of one. Decide what each part of your wall is proposing, name the experience first, and let the grade distribution show you whether you read your customers right.

Next month: the grade curve itself, and the uncomfortable possibility your hardest routes might be your least valuable ones.

This is chapter four of an ongoing series. If you asked your setters what the last reset was proposing - not which grades it filled - what do you think they'd say?

About the Authors

Jez Tapping is an indoor climbing industry consultant with over 20 years in the sector, including as former Regional Climbing Manager and Head of Climbing at one of the UK's busiest indoor climbing centres. He holds a BA in Sports Development and Coaching and an Masters in Sports Management, sat on the board of NICAS for 9 years, and is Chief Commercial Officer of the Global Climbing Standard. His work spans commercial strategy, governance, operational improvement and coaching programme development for climbing gyms and federations worldwide.

Jérôme Meyer is a French professional climber turned route-setting entrepreneur. A four-time Bouldering World Cup champion (2001, 2002, 2003, 2006), he retired from competition in 2008 and went on to serve as the Olympic and Sport Director within World Climbing. He is now co-founder and CEO of Circle, a global platform connecting climbing gyms, route setters, and hold brands through 3D route-setting technology.