Part II · Chapter 3 · Risk, without the score · lesson 12
Read your own register back, and answer what it asks
14 min
Builds on The first thing that does not line up
Part II · Chapter 3 · Risk, without the score · lesson 12
14 min
Builds on The first thing that does not line up
Everything in this track has been one column at a time. The bands, then the treatment, then the name on the acceptances. This lesson is the whole thing at once, read the way somebody who did not write it would read it.
Three passes, and they take about four minutes each.
Pass one: each row on its own. Is it a sentence with a path, an outcome and somebody who carries it, or is it a noun with bands against it? Fix the nouns. You will find two or three.
Pass two: each row against its own treatment. Does the treatment move the thing the sentence describes? A row about approval happening in chat, treated by annual training, is a mismatch you can see from across the room once the sentence is specific. And for every accept, read the name and ask whether that person could have said no.
Pass three: the whole register, start to finish, without stopping. Time it. Whether you got to the bottom is the only measurement in this lesson, and it is about the document rather than about you.
Your own register
Nothing here is graded, and nothing here leaves your browser unless you are signed in. A filled-in register is an inventory of your known weaknesses, so keep the real one where your auditor can see it — this is somewhere to think.
What could go wrong
A sentence with a victim in it, not a category. There is no score field here and there is nowhere to put one: the two bands are never multiplied.
Once a year or so
A customer notices
What will you do about it?
What does not line up
Nothing yet, because there is nothing in here yet. An empty workspace has no contradictions and tells you nothing.
These are contradictions between things you wrote. Nothing here can tell you whether any of it is enough — that is a judgement, and it moves with the auditor, the boundary and the year.
That number is open contradictions between things you wrote. It is not a score, it cannot be converted into one, and it rises as you fill the register in honestly: add a real sentence and the engine can see more about it, mark an acceptance and the missing name becomes visible, name a treatment and the absent control becomes visible.
Which is the only direction a number in this subject is allowed to move. Nobody screenshots a figure they want to be low and have deliberately made higher, so this one cannot be sent to a customer as a claim. It falls when you do work and it rises when you tell the truth, and those are both the correct behaviour.
What the engine cannot see is most of what matters. It cannot read your band definitions, because you kept them in your own notes. It cannot tell whether the name on an acceptance is a person who would say yes. It cannot tell a risk you have thought about carefully from one you typed to fill a gap. None of that is a defect to be fixed later — it is the boundary between what two pieces of your own data can settle and what only a person can.
Read your register once more and check for these. They are the milestone, and none of them is a number.
Every risk names a treatment, and the treatment is what is happening. Not what somebody intends. A row marked reduce with nobody reducing it is one risk plus one untrue statement about your organisation.
Every acceptance names a person who would say so out loud. Not a committee, not the register keeper, not whoever was senior enough to be plausible. Somebody who could have said no.
No row anywhere carries a number you got by multiplying. There is nowhere in this register to put one, which is a design decision rather than an omission. Four-and-three and two-and-six are not the same risk, they want different treatments, and a column that reports them as equal was always going to be the column people read.
Check
Two honest gaps, and both of them will come up the moment you work with a real one.
There is one position per risk here, not two. No inherent-and-residual pair, and nowhere to put one. You will meet that format everywhere else, and the questions to ask of it are the ones from earlier in this track: what date was each half written, and was the register older than the control.
And the condition attached to an acceptance — until the migration ships, as long as we hear within a day — has no field either. That sentence is usually the most valuable line anybody said in the meeting. Write it in your own notes beside the row, because no register this author has seen has a column for it, including this one.