SHINE YOUR LIGHT FOR EVERYONE TO SEE

My ginger cat has hurt his paw. I don’t know how. I am not sure quite when. There’s nothing to see. But he is limping and clearly feeling sorry for himself. I feel unreasonably concerned about him as he has been my responsibility since the day he moved in abandoning his life on the streets.

So, I’ve been looking around for whatever may have happened to him.

There are plenty places and ways it might have happened. Leaping about on the rooftop next door that he accesses from the balcony outside my office. Racing up the stairs to chase off the black and white cat that sneaks in when I’m not looking. Squeezing into the drawer under my desk when I’m working.

There are risks everywhere. And maybe if I’d put in the miles to think about things in advance I might have prevented whatever accident has befallen my unfortunate furry friend. But, then again, I hadn’t intended to have a cat – far less two – when I moved in and life has been rejigged to make may for the change of use.

Real retrofitting is often heavy on the bank balance, disruptive to do and awkward to live with. It is obviously the case you stand a better chance of managing risk if you can build safety in at the outset. Sadly, while you can improve how something looks after the fact, there is a real possibility that - if you don’t think through risk when you have a chance - it is less likely to happen at all.

Once the contractors have left the site, while there may be small wins and precautions I could find, they’d more likely be common sense safety things: close the drawers; put a fire guard around the hearth; make sure I don’t have wires dangling all over the place. Anything major and you have to make serious decisions about where the scales fall in the balance between cost and utility.

I know this is a trivial everyday tale of ordinary pet people but it does illustrate a couple of points.

-?????First, when use and users change. the risks you first identified may need to be refreshed too. Risk is a slippery thing and keeps changing – managing it is not something done once and then tidily tucked away.

-?????Then, while learning from your mistakes is only sensible, you won’t prevent every problem by concentrating so hard on the last disaster you fail to see the next obstacle in your path. Risk management has to be progressive and forward looking too.

-?????And, just sometimes, the time, effort and cost are disproportionate to the problem. After all I can’t do anything much about the neighbour’s roof. I don’t own the interloping cat. And, as all cats will be cats, they will always find a way of worming their way into places they just ought not to go. ?Besides – and whisper it softly dear reader - he is only a cat [and it’s just a little limp].

Before coming to APS I’d not thought much about risk management. If I considered it at all I thought it was somebody else’s problem. I took it for granted and assumed someone else had taken care of it. I didn’t know who. And I didn’t much care.

Now, from the sublime to the ridiculous of living through a house refurbishment to working on the consequences of the Grenfell disaster, I have become a passionate believer in safety being the most important thing on any project. And something in which we all have a stake. I also think risk management is seriously undervalued and its practitioners badly underrated.

Now I know you, I understand the deep wealth of experience you bring to the role. I can see the technical skills you all possess - and share freely with each other. But what continues to amaze me is the way you marry those professional talents with the need also to be both stargazer and psychologist.

You would think everyone would buy into safety. But getting people to act safely is a different challenge. Often, people don’t do what they should - or won’t live with what is demanded. The worst option is that, when safety improvements are made, users won’t do what was intended or even revert to whatever they were doing wrong in the first place. Rarely is this because things have been poorly designed or badly executed. But sometimes the old ways may have seemed easier. Sometimes because habits die hard. And sometimes it’s just because changes have not been properly explained or embedded – maybe users were not consulted or involved in advance.

It takes a skilful practitioner to navigate it all. It is too easy to act like a latter-day Moses, laying down the law and just dictating to people. But that is as effective as shouting at my cats.

Managing risk means managing people. And I have found kindness works wonders. It ?sticks in the mind and the memory. Today is ‘random acts of kindness day’ so I am off to find people to whom I can be randomly kind. I won’t say what I’m going to do – but it may involve scones.

At APS we try to be kind. But we also strive to be useful and help you ?keep up to date providing a forum to share both technical information and management tools. But we are also there to keep on shouting out for safety. There is a case to be made. And if we don’t do it, who will?