Risk has benefits?

It is about managing risks. That is one of the primary requirements intended by the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015. For me it should be the foundation of any organisation. 

Having blogged about risk before, I don’t want to be seen to be repeating myself. I do however feel it is important that when discussing risk we are all on the same page. 

Risk is not a hazard. Hazards create risk. Something I felt needed to be cleared up. 

For years people have debated over the definition of risk, and I have no intention of adding fuel to that fire. 

But we (the Health and Safety Profession) all agree. When considering risk we need to consider two things. 

• The likelihood of an event occurring, and 
• The severity of the consequence 

Now that we are all on the same page with traditional risk considerations, might I be so bold as to add a third consideration?

•  The benefits 

Now I hear you all say... “the benefits of risk, risk has benefits?”

Yes it does and I believe in some circumstances this needs to form a key part of your risk assessment. 

This has been something I have been doing for years in the outdoors while providing a range of learning experiences. It was great to see internationally it has been recognised as a key component of risk assessment. 

In this blog I want to share the principals of how risk benefit assessment can be applied. 

So let’s start at the top.

1. Identify the hazards. This does not change. We need to identify the things that can cause harm. Now this maybe at an organisational level and be quite broad, might be at the coal face were we are considering each aspect of what we do or could be while on the fly facilitating. 

2. Assess the risk. This looks the same I hear you say. Well for the most part ... it is. Not considering the risks in the traditional sense (i.e. what could go wrong) would be fool-hardy. Where this differs is once we have done that we need to consider the benefits of why we are doing the activity / lesson / trip / programme. Or you could look at the risks of not doing the activity / lesson / trip / programme. 

We should be considering the benefits against the goals or objectives we are trying to achieve. This is going to be hard and some true reflection will need to take place here. For those of you entrenched in having to use a ‘risk matrix’ ... you will need to let this go. Numbers and colours may not be the best way to do this. 

It becomes even more difficult when working in a very dynamic environment, and this is where good training, induction and clear communication to your staff is important.

3. Once we have assessed the risks and considered the benefits we need to put in place suitable and sufficient controls to manage the risk of something going wrong adequately and still provide an opportunity to realise the benefits of completing the activity / lesson / trip / programme. 

In the youth development / outdoor education / tourism and school sectors this is where we need to also consider real vs. perceived risk. That is a topic for another day. 

4. We then move into monitoring. Again this is where it is a blend of traditional monitoring techniques such as:

• Inspections
• Walk arounds
• Safety observations 
• Incident reviews etc...

... but now we need to also consider, are we realising the benefits we are intending to try achieve? This can be done through quantitative analysis using surveys or qualitative through discussions and journal writing. Using qualitative monitoring requires critical analysis and discussion. Not just looking at numbers. 


5. The final stage in the cycle. Review. We need to review our risks as we would in the traditional sense. This may be cyclical based on the level of risk or importance to achieving organisational outcomes. This could be following an incident or change to legislation or organisational policy. 

Your risk assessment approach needs to be well considered and should be articulated in policy and backed up with a robust and sometimes dynamic procedure. 

I run a workshop Risk Benefit Assessment 101 which will walk you through how to implement and use this process. 

So jump on a public course or reach out for an organisation specific one.