Tell me if this sounds familiar: a senior leader asks every department to complete a risk register. Very sensible and grown-up. Very “we are taking this seriously”.
Then an Excel sheet arrives.
You open it, briefly. It has columns – many columns – with risk description, likelihood, impact, mitigation, owner and comments. There is even colour-coding, which suggests someone, somewhere, once cared deeply.
You close it. For the next two weeks, it sits in your inbox making quiet moral accusations. Then, at 10.47pm the night before the deadline, after all your “actual” work is finished, you finally complete it. You type things like “staff capacity” and “supplier delays”. You assign likelihoods with the confidence of a weather forecast. You add mitigations that are sensible enough on paper, if not yet exactly bursting with operational detail.
Then you send it, and...DONE.
Except, of course, it is not done. It is filed away and nobody follows up. The actions do not happen and the risks remain exactly where they were, except now they have been professionally documented.
It's quite silly, really, because the point of a risk register is not to prove that risks have been put into a spreadsheet. The point is to understand what might hurt the work, and then do something about it.
That is where Marph’s Where’s the Fire? structured meeting board changes the whole dynamic. Instead of one tired person performing a late-night fire drill in Excel, the team works through the risks together in one hour. They identify what could go wrong, assess what actually matters, agree what needs action, and leave with owners, deadlines and shared commitment to resolving them.
So, the senior leader still gets the risk register. But they also get something rarer: people who understand it, believe in it, know exactly what they are supposed to do next, and are motivated to do it.
Why not spot the smoke while you can still do something about it, rather than discover the fire later when it has brought friends, invoices and consequences.
