We’ve all seen them: the colourful red-amber-green grids and the 3 x 3, or 5 x 5 matrices that spit out a “Risk Rating.” For some, these numbers are essential for prioritising resources. For others, they are a subjective exercise in “making the numbers fit” to justify a task.
I’d love to hear your honest thoughts on these risk ratings:
Essential: we couldn’t prioritise without them.
Useful: but they’re often complicated.
Pointless: they just hide the real risks in the numbers.
I have a better alternative! (Tell us in the comments)
0voters
Also - are they actually useful - or are they just there to satisfy an auditor. And what do you do when two people do the same risk assessment and give completely different scores?
Can we not subjectively describe the likelihood and severity in our risk assessments (e.g. ‘staff are likely to receive serious injuries such as fractures’, ‘could lead to fatalities’, etc.)?
Personally - I don’t believe I’ve ever seen them used effectively. I’ve seen managers coerce safety professionals because task X ‘can’t possibly be a 6’. So the likelihood gets changed to make it a more palatable 4.
But I can imagine that in complex industries (e.g. petro-chemical, aerospace, etc.) they could be useful.
Where do you stand? Drop a comment below—I’m curious to see if we have any “Matrix Loyalists” or if everyone is ready to bin them.
i do like to see the risk matrices as i feel the risk has actually been read and understood, problem with the risk matrices is everyone has different views on the actual risk, as you say the score can be different from one assessor to the next, and i do believe scores are manipulated to please auditors and those involved in the RA.
The modern way is purely qualitative but I have no issue slotting in a 1-3 if requested or required
Those of the old-school and those that live and die by IOSH template format seem to require a semi-quantitative rating system to accept any assessment. It can be a lot of energy to try and explain to someone that doesn’t already know that qualitative and semi-quantitative are essentially the same thing e.g Its my best guess
In my experience the way to bring peace to clients, accreditation services and those reading tenders alike is to add a clarification of what the rating system is or why there isn’t one. Even then though, someone somewhere will be absolutely certain that it cannot be a risk assessment without a completely arbitrary risk rating system. They walk among us.
Regarding rating systems I have a story;
I have also seen an advisor with 20+ years experience argue that they absolutely needed a 1-9 rating system because with 1-3 there wasn’t enough difference in the scores to sufficiently separate the mediocre sites from the bad ones. Once implemented, 2 things happened;
The spread of the scores didn’t noticeably change (oops) and as bonuses depended on the scores assigned to each site,
Management were also seeking justification as to why some things were a 7/9 and some were a 6/9 when the images and issues were near identical.
Hi RTK. Welcome to the community. Glad to hear that we’re attracting like-minded people here (although differences of opinion are always welcome). Regarding health and safety ‘scores’ and bonuses - you’ve given me an idea for a future post!