Problem 03Early Warning
You Find Out When It Is Already Too Late.
Risk arrives as a claim, a resignation or an audit finding. Almost never as a warning.
Nearly every people risk announces itself well before it lands. A work authorisation approaches expiry. A review slips. A case drifts past its milestone. A repeated grievance starts to look like a pattern. None of this is concealed and none of it is sudden. It is simply nobody's job to notice, so the window in which acting would have been quiet, cheap and uncontroversial closes without anyone marking the date.
What It Looks Like
From the inside, it looks like this
Nothing surfaces itself
The information is already in a system. It sits there waiting for somebody to think to go and look for it.
Checking is periodic; risk is not
A quarterly review means up to three months of drift discovered all at once - or discovered by somebody outside the organisation first.
Known dates arrive as emergencies
Statutory deadlines are visible years ahead and still land as a scramble, because nothing counts down to them.
Patterns only resolve afterwards
The third similar grievance is the point it becomes a pattern. It is also, by then, the point it becomes disclosable.
What It Costs
What it costs you
The same issue, priced at two very different moments.
Quiet fixes become formal processes
Caught early, it is a conversation. Caught late, it is a procedure, a paper trail and possibly a third party.
Issues become incidents
An expiry you can see is an errand. An expiry you missed is a breach, and it is now on somebody's report.
Confidence you cannot justify
Silence gets read as good news. It holds as an assumption right up to the moment it very publicly does not.
The Test
Questions you should be able to answer today
If any of these takes more than a moment, the exposure is not theoretical.
- What is drifting off track right now?
- Which obligations fall due in the next ninety days?
- Where are we relying on a particular person remembering?
- What would we have wanted to know three months before the last claim?
- If the same thing started again tomorrow, how would we find out?
“There is nearly always a moment when the problem was still small. The only question is whether anybody was looking at it then.”
The Other Four