Risk assessment can be an artful science, or a scientific art. Or at least, it should be.
I started to establish for you what risk assessment entails in the first post of this series, which is a breakdown of an interesting article by Bruce Lyon and Georgi Popov in the March 2016 issue of Professional Safety magazine.
This article discusses risk assessment and how the new workplace paradigm suggests that we learn to combine and modify various risk and hazard evaluation tools at our disposal in order to more accurately understand risks in our workplace and dissect them from an angle more conducive to our current protocols and safety management efforts.
The Art of the Risk Assessment Science
As safety officers, we can generally come to a consensus that in some ways, we are all scientists. But even with some of the great scientists in the world (some of which, I believe, are in our profession) have to use artistic creativity within the parameters of science in order to innovate and make discoveries.
Without that creative bent, many of the risk-evaluation methods we currently use might never have been created or discovered, and where would the science of safety be right now if not for that artistic expression?
Lyon and Popov take this bull by the horns and attempt to provide some current scenarios (plausible ones, of course) and essentially write about the different ways that some of our evaluation methods could be modified to work better in certain situations than any single evaluation method could in the past.
Lyon and Popov define the “art of assessing risk” as the ability to be accurate in expecting and estimating the “worst credible” effect that could occur in any given situation and the odds of it happening. You take this one step further and consider how likely is this “worst credible” impact to occur during the lifetime of the system? That is a very different take than the likelihood of something ever happening.
Early Stages of Risk Assessment
Many of us are familiar with the general risk-assessment steps, and Lyon and Popov lay out each of the steps and mention that the use of these modified or combined methods comes in the second step, which is after we establish criteria and context for the risk being assessed. We’ll get into where the rubber meets the road in the next post, but here is a good time to review the first step of this process, which tends to go in a cycle (as I am sure some of you readers can attest).
The first step in the process is to establish risk criteria and context. To do this, we are to develop a risk-assessment matrix, which looks at probabilities of an incident occurring and measuring the severity of the incident to help prioritize the risks that are prevalent in any particular situation, so sound decisions can be made about controls and hazard mitigation.
As you look at the severity of possible incidents combined with the chances of a particular incident occurring during the life of the current system, reasonable decisions can be made about safety and risk mitigation that won’t involve over-protection.
The key, here, though, as the authors note, is that democracy prevails in finding the risk-assessment matrix that will work best and is more widely accepted as credible by the greatest number of stakeholders (with recommendation by you, the safety officer, of course, as the resident “expert”).
Next up is the fun part – I’ll delve into Lyon and Popov’s dissection of the second step in the process, which is probably the most important in order to have an accurate assessment – choosing the right risk-assessment method to use in your particular context, and considering the combination or modification of such methods. The case studies should be interesting, no?