Connecting Plain Risk with professional practice

Plain Risk is compatible with other professional approaches to risk management. They often examine the same situation from different perspectives, with overlaps in their concepts and methods and differences in their purposes and definitions.

Professional disciplines develop approaches for the risks they manage. Organisational risk management commonly uses registers to bring risks together. Aviation safety and major-hazard management use scenario-based methods, including bowties, to examine how harm could occur and what could prevent it.

Related professional approaches and terms

Risk registers: causes, events, and consequences

Risk descriptions in registers often connect causes, potential events, and consequences. The UK government’s Orange Book uses this structure.

Plain Risk examines these connections with possible harm or loss at the centre. That harm may occupy a consequence field in a register organised around an earlier event. Cause and consequence describe relationships: the same occurrence can be a consequence of one thing and a cause of another. See Plain Risk’s core model.

Bowtie analysis: hazards, threats, and controls

Bowtie analysis connects threats to a top event and then to possible consequences, with controls along those paths. The top event represents loss of control over a hazard. Plain Risk’s central harm may therefore appear among a bowtie’s consequences. The two diagrams can describe connected parts of a situation while having different centres.

Bowties show how protective barriers relate to a scenario. Plain Risk’s control model helps examine a selected measure through its objective, intended effect, and the effect being assessed.

Objectives-based risk management

ISO 31000 defines risk as the “effect of uncertainty on objectives”, including positive and negative effects. Plain Risk uses risk for a possibility of harm or loss, while recognising that consequences can be beneficial, harmful, or neutral.

The approaches overlap when examining harm that could obstruct an objective. Plain Risk describes the harmful possibility and its connections. An objectives-based approach places it within the organisation’s wider management of uncertainty, including planning and decision-making. The different meanings of risk need to be kept clear when using the approaches together.