Risk Experts / Using it

A register short enough to be held in mind

Fifteen entries that leadership can name beats three hundred nobody reads.

The length of a register is inversely related to its use. Beyond a couple of dozen entries nobody can hold the set in mind, prioritisation becomes impossible, and the document becomes something produced rather than consulted.

Reducing it is painful because every entry has an advocate and removal implies that something no longer matters. The practical route is not deletion but tiering: a short strategic register that leadership actually works from, and operational registers held at the level where the work is done.

The tiering only works if promotion and demotion between tiers is a real decision with a person making it. Where everything is copied upward, the strategic register becomes a summary of the operational ones and the problem returns.

The test is simple and worth running: ask three senior people to name the organisation's top five risks without looking. If the answers overlap substantially, the register is doing its job. If they do not, the document exists and the shared understanding does not.

The other advantage of a short register is that it can be discussed rather than reviewed. Fifteen entries fit into a conversation in which people disagree about priority, which is the conversation that produces decisions. Three hundred entries can only be processed, and processing is what a register does instead of being used.