Home>Premises>Risk Management>Practitioner viewpoint
ARTICLE

Practitioner viewpoint

11 December 2024

MAKING DECISIONS of where to direct resources to deliver best value for organisations in terms of overall risk reduction can be challenging. Louise Ward provides an insight.

On 21 October one person died and 15 were injured when two passenger trains collided at Talerddig in Wales. The incident attracted lots of focus and comment in the news, with several commentators expressing concern about the safety of rail transport.

Any life lost is of course a tragedy, and my thoughts are with the those directly affected by this incident, as well as those working hard to investigate what went wrong, and ensure that any learning is embedded to reduce the chances of recurrence. However, this was the first passenger fatality on the UK railway since 2020. Every year there are around 1.6 billion passenger journeys made, so statistically rail remains an extremely safe mode of travel.

It’s interesting to note the way in which risk perception can be skewed by a single high profile event. The issue is that people base their judgement on their experience, so in the case of rail travel, anyone who doesn’t regularly use the railway is likely to base their risk judgement on the information presented to them on the news or on social media.

This illustrates a challenge faced regularly by safety professionals. In our role we are charged with directing limited resources to deliver best value for our organisations in terms of overall risk reduction. However, it’s common for business leaders to get distracted by the potential for high consequence / low likelihood events when actually there is probably greater benefit to be achieved by focusing on medium consequence and likelihood issues. 

In order to establish the best focus for risk mitigation activity, it’s useful to consider not just the risk profile of the organisation, but also the risk appetite. In an ideal world we might aspire to drive every safety risk to zero, but while this aspiration can drive a healthy continual improvement culture, it’s important to recognise that zero risk is a practical impossibility in the real world. It’s actually much easier to inspire engagement in a risk mitigation plan which is based on understanding and agreement of achievable, proportionate and relevant targets, but it requires a high level of cultural maturity to openly articulate tolerance of any level of safety risk.

As subject matter experts it’s our job to lead these discussions, and to provide a balanced summary of information which provides context for every risk discussion. It’s not just about the hazard potential or the likelihood of harm, it’s also about the available mitigation actions, and the level of effort and resource required to implement these. Of course we need to present this information as an overall picture, so that leaders are able to consider each risk in the context of the others, enabling effective discussions about the optimum level of control – the point at which each risk reaches a tolerable level through the application of an achievable overall control strategy. 

The interesting thing is that this process is very familiar to business leaders, who regularly make similar judgements in the context of commercial and financial decision making. The difference is that their experience of safety is much more limited, and the stakes can feel higher when their context comes from the media which of course only tends to feature stories about extreme events. Once presented with a more balanced overall risk profile, leaders tend to be much more comfortable about making decisions and articulating their appetite for risk in a safety context as well as a business one, and this can drive a maturity of safety culture which ultimately facilitates effective risk control.

So don’t let the media drive decision making in your business. Focus on building a contextualised risk profile, and help your organisation to make better risk decisions overall.

Louise Ward is safety & sustainability director at G&W UK – Safety. For more information, visit www.gwrr.co.uk

 
OTHER ARTICLES IN THIS SECTION
FEATURED SUPPLIERS
TWITTER FEED
 
//