Part II · Chapter 3 · Risk, without the score · lesson 2
Write down what your middle band actually means
13 min
Part II · Chapter 3 · Risk, without the score · lesson 2
13 min
Move the likelihood slider in the register below. There is no number on it. It says once in a few years, then once a year or so, then several times a year. The band is stored as a digit and never shown as one, because a digit on a screen is a digit somebody multiplies.
Which leaves you with words, and the words are the part that has to do work.
Our middle band reads once a year or so. That phrase is ours, written for a generic reader, and it is probably wrong for you. A payments company and a two-person consultancy do not mean the same thing by once a year, and neither of them means what a hospital means by it.
A band definition has one job: to make two people agree.
Not to be accurate — nobody can measure the annual frequency of an event that has never happened here. To be applicable: specific enough that two people in your organisation, handed the same risk and the same definition, land on the same band without negotiating.
That is a testable property, and it is the only one available. A definition that passes it gives you a register you can read in six months and still understand. A definition that fails it gives you a register that records who was in the room.
The words that fail are the comparative ones. Likely, moderate, fairly rare — each describes the speaker's feeling about the risk rather than the risk, so the band moves when the speaker does.
First, read the five likelihood bands and the five impact bands in the block below and decide, for each, whether the words describe your world. Where they do not, write the version that would. Write it down somewhere you keep things, because this workspace stores which band you picked and not what you meant by it — that asymmetry is real and it is the whole argument for writing the definition down outside this page.
Second, add two risks using them. Not your worst two. Two where you expect the bands to be awkward, because an awkward band is a band whose definition is about to get better.
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.
If the referee has nothing to say, that is not a verdict on your bands. The engine can see that two risks exist and cannot see what band three means to you. It will never read a definition you kept on paper, and it would be lying if it pretended to.
That is the shape of the whole subject in one object. The engine can tell you that a risk marked accepted has nobody's name against it, because both halves of that contradiction are in the data. It cannot tell you that your band three means two different things to two of your colleagues, because neither half is.
So the bands are the one part of this register that nothing downstream will ever check. Which is exactly why they are the part that has to be written down, by you, in words, before anything else in the register means anything.
Check
One more probe, and it takes ten seconds per band. Take your band three and name the thing that is one notch more likely than it. If you can name it, the definition is doing work. If the only difference you can state is that the other one feels worse, the band is describing a feeling, and every row you file under it inherits the feeling.