Part II · Chapter 3 · Risk, without the score · lesson 5

Accepting a risk is a decision, and decisions have names on them

12 min

Three registers, from three organisations, none of them careless.

The first has four rows marked accepted. Against each one, a name, a date, and one line saying what the person was told when they said yes. Two of the four names are the same person. One of them is a founder.

The second has nine rows marked accepted and an empty column beside them. The register was built by one person over two weeks from a template, and the template had the column.

The third has eleven rows marked accepted and the finance director's name against all eleven, entered on the same afternoon in the same handwriting. The finance director has seen two of them.

Two of those three registers record that nobody in the organisation has accepted anything. One of them looks tidier than the other while doing it.

A risk marked accepted with no name against it is the most common finding in this field. Not the most serious; the most common.

The reason is not carelessness. The acceptance is a decision made in a conversation, and the field for it sits on a different screen from the conversation. Somebody decides, in a meeting, that the staging copy is a thing we live with until the migration. Nobody writes it down, because writing it down means opening the register and entering a name three days later, when the sentence they would have written has gone.

What makes an acceptance real is that the named person would repeat it. Not that they signed something: that if you walked up with the row, they would read it and say yes, that is mine.

Which is the test for whether the name you typed is a decision.

The three weeks before the review

What would you do

You keep the third register. Eleven rows say accepted and all eleven carry the finance director's name because somebody had to put something in the column before it went out. An internal review is in three weeks, and you have about a day and a half of other people's attention to spend between now and then.
Optimising for
Finish with an acceptance on each row that the named person would repeat out loud, at the least cost in other people's time.
You cannot know
  • Whether the finance director remembers the two they did see
  • Whether anybody else is willing to carry the other nine
  • How the reviewer reads an empty column against a wrong name
  • Whether the nine are even finance's to accept
  • What the organisation does when somebody declines to accept one
Choose an option

Why this subject's register asks inline

The block you have been filling in asks for the name in the same place and the same second you choose accept. There is no separate owner screen and no field you can come back to.

That is not virtue, it is the only fix that has ever worked. The reason the column is empty in the second register is that the person who built it had to leave the row, go somewhere else, and come back — and the thing about coming back is that nobody does. Making the field appear where the decision is made is the difference between a register that records acceptances and a register that records intentions to record acceptances.

Check

An acceptance from two years ago carries a name. That person left in March. What is the row now?

Choose one answer

Worth remembering

  • An acceptance with no name is the most common finding in this field.
  • The reason is that the field sits on a different screen from the decision.
  • A real acceptance is one the named person would repeat out loud.
  • One wrong name across eleven rows fails all eleven in one question.
  • An empty field is a question; a placeholder name is an answer that breaks.
  • When the named person leaves, nothing turns red and nobody carries it.