by Stephen McPhie, CA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.
I have just returned from a few days at Wimbledon watching my daughter play in a junior tennis tournament. It’s been a great week and a wonderful experience for the kids being able to play on the hallowed turf (but not on Centre Court unfortunately). Although not detracting too much, it has also been an example of how unthinking and inflexibly applied risk management and bureaucracy can serve to create little more than frustration and irritation and probable do nothing to lessen risk.
The organizers and security staff have their instructions and work their seemingly interminable way of enforcing all the rules to the letter, no matter how unnecessary they seem. Clearly with a large number of kids around, they are very concerned about avoiding injuries or something going wrong and this is a laudable objective.
A couple of examples follow – perhaps relatively inconsequential in themselves but intended to illustrate a point.
Security staff do a good job but are mainly people who probably don’t have a lot of power in other aspects of their lives. Some of them seem happy to wield their temporary power inflexibly. One in particular kept chasing after people to stop them taking a direct route beside Court 1 to get from the competition pavilion to the shop. He made them exit from one gate, walk along the road and re-enter another gate, a much longer route. This reduced the risk that people could get a free peek at Court 1 without paying for a tour of the grounds (actually futile as competitors and parents were given a free tour pass anyway). Eliminating one perceived risk that actually did not exist created a worse one by forcing kids to walk along the road.
There was a dinner one evening for all competitors. They had to be delivered by the parents to the competition pavilion. They were then organized into groups, counted and led along in lines to the dinner venue at the other end of the grounds where they were counted again. Had they been delivered by parents directly to the dinner venue in the first place, only one count would have been necessary, nor would they have had to form groups and lines.
These things did not really lesson the overall experience or enjoyment of the week. However, it would not take much thought and imagination to allow some flexibility and remove some of the petty irritants. This made me wonder how many businesses are similarly losing sight of the risks in favour of process and bureaucracy. This could be why risk management has a bad name in many organizations and does not get buy in, so is consequently ineffective.
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