FEATURE
SEEING THE WHOLE RISK
Nikki Porter, CEO of PHSC plc, looks beyond the silo to explore how risks can emerge in the gaps between teams, responsibilities and decisions.
THE MYTH OF THE ISOLATED INCIDENT
When something goes seriously wrong, the first questions are often about the person closest to the incident. Who carried out the work? Who signed the permit? Which procedure was not followed?
Those questions matter, but they rarely tell the whole story. In my experience, the more useful question is often: who else needed to know?
Take a straightforward example. A contractor arrives to carry out intrusive work. The permit has been issued, but the drawing being used is out of date. The facilities team knows that services were rerouted during an earlier refurbishment, but that information has not reached the project manager or contractor.
Each person may believe they have completed their part of the process, yet the overall control has still failed. The risk developed as information and responsibility passed between teams.
Most serious failures do not sit neatly within one department. They develop in the gaps between them.
Health and safety, facilities management, security, quality and operations are still treated separately in many organisations. Each team may be working hard and apparently performing well, while the risks where their responsibilities overlap remain poorly understood.
Seeing the whole risk is not about removing specialist responsibility. It is about making sure those specialists are looking at the same operational picture.
THE CHECKLIST TRAP: WHEN COMPLIANCE MASKS VULNERABILITY
Checklists, audits and management systems all have an important role. Used well, they provide consistency, establish accountability and help organisations identify gaps.
The problem arises when completing the checklist becomes the objective, rather than establishing whether the control works in practice.
A permit can be completed correctly while the drawing behind it is wrong. An audit action can be closed after refresher training, while the workload or conflicting instructions behind the original problem remain unchanged. A procedure can be clear on paper but difficult to follow during the busiest part of the working day.
A completed checklist tells you that a check was made. It does not, on its own, tell you that the risk is controlled.
The same applies to ISO certification. Standards such as ISO 45001, ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 provide valuable frameworks, but certification should support continuing improvement rather than become an end in itself.
The real value comes when audit findings, near misses, maintenance records, security reports and operational performance are considered together. A repeated minor issue in one system may be an early warning of a wider problem.
Boards therefore need more than confirmation that documents are current and actions have been closed.
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