Oct 8, 2026 · 57 min · 14 segments
‘Just copy the controls from the last one.’ If that's how your risk assessments go, you're colouring in, not controlling. In this episode, Mark Alston of Investigations Differently explains why so…
Mark AlstonGuestChristinaHost
Is it copy and paste? You know, like, have you been the poor advisor or officer or whoever, safety person or whatever, and you go into a room and you bring in your laptop, you plug it into the projector, and then all of a sudden, and then you're filling out the form and you copy paste and they just go, oh, you know, just copy the control from that or just copy the controls for that.
When's the last time something really innovative came out of one of your risk assessments where you've discovered something that was completely brand new, where someone came up with an amazing control and you thought, oh, why haven't we thought of this before? Why aren't we doing this already? Or are we simply recording the things we know about and the controls we already have? How much trouble do you have getting people to actually even go to your risk assessments, to your workshops? When's the last time anyone got an email for an invite, for a team's invite or a meeting invite in a summer room somewhere that said, oh, you're invited to this risk assessment workshop.
So we're going to talk about five things that you can do today and you can start doing to make a difference.
And the first one is why we even do them, what we're actually trying to achieve.
Who has that knowledge? Where is that knowledge in our business? And why do we need to know? What's so important about it? And for those that have done the investigation series with us, this will sound familiar because it's the same.
And Christine's already said about investigations or risk assessments after we've done something, had an event, and risk assessments or investigations we did before we had an event.
Is it copy and paste? You know, like, have you been the poor advisor or officer or whoever, safety person or whatever, and you go into a room and you bring in your laptop, you plug it into the projector, and then all of a sudden, and then you're filling out the form and you copy paste and they just go, oh, you know, just copy the control from that or just copy the controls for that.
When's the last time something really innovative came out of one of your risk assessments where you've discovered something that was completely brand new, where someone came up with an amazing control and you thought, oh, why haven't we thought of this before? Why aren't we doing this already? Or are we simply recording the things we know about and the controls we already have? How much trouble do you have getting people to actually even go to your risk assessments, to your workshops? When's the last time anyone got an email for an invite, for a team's invite or a meeting invite in a summer room somewhere that said, oh, you're invited to this risk assessment workshop.
So we're going to talk about five things that you can do today and you can start doing to make a difference.
And the first one is why we even do them, what we're actually trying to achieve.
Who has that knowledge? Where is that knowledge in our business? And why do we need to know? What's so important about it? And for those that have done the investigation series with us, this will sound familiar because it's the same.
And Christine's already said about investigations or risk assessments after we've done something, had an event, and risk assessments or investigations we did before we had an event.
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