Raise the Standard | Tool 2
The G.A.P.E. Assessment
Twenty questions, five per layer. An honest first read on the distance between what your leaders believe, what your documents say, what your people actually do and what you can prove.
Three rules
- Answer honestly. This is not a test anyone else marks.
- An answer of yes, I think so, without evidence to hand, is a no.
- Score yourself on the lowest consistent behaviour in the business, not the best site, the best manager or the best month.
The purpose is not a number. It is to find out which layer of your organisation you can trust and which one is quietly carrying assumptions.
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Governance
what leaders believe is happening
Can every member of the leadership team name the three to five risks in this business most likely to kill or seriously harm someone, without checking a folder, and would their lists match?
When did an officer of this organisation last physically verify a critical control in the field, and can you name the date and the control?
Does the board receive evidence of control effectiveness, or activity counts and lag indicators?
Could each officer describe, in their own words, how they meet their due diligence duty?
If a regulator asked tomorrow for proof of due diligence, what would you actually table?
Assumptions
what the documents say
When were your critical documents last reviewed against how the work is actually done, rather than against a calendar?
Do your registers and procedures describe current operations, or a site, a structure or an era the business has moved past?
Does every critical document have a named owner and version control, and would anyone notice if it silently went stale?
Read your residual risk ratings cold, as a stranger would. Does any document sign this organisation up to a level of risk you would not say out loud?
Does any control in your system read be careful, stick to the plan or words to that effect?
Practice
what people actually do
When did a senior leader last watch the work as it is actually done, unescorted and unannounced?
What do experienced people change about the job when conditions demand it, and does anyone above them know?
Which worker concerns are currently open, how long have they been open and who is waiting on an answer?
Are your inductions and pre-starts performed, or performed for the record?
If a control was quietly dropped on your busiest site this month, how would you find out?
Evidence
what can be proven
For your top three fatal risks, write the date a senior person last confirmed each control was in place and working. Can you fill the column?
Could you demonstrate with records that the last five worker concerns raised were acted on and closed?
Is your near miss reporting rising, flat or falling, and is your explanation for that trend evidence or hope?
Where your documents and your data disagree, which version reaches the board?
What proportion of your assurance is things you have seen, versus things you have been told?
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Reading your results
The disagreement matters more than the score
Most organisations find the same shape. Assumptions is the strongest layer, because documents are what organisations are best at producing. Evidence is the weakest, because verification is what organisations most reliably skip. A confident Governance column sitting above an empty Evidence column is the exact blind spot this book was written about, and it is worth more to you than any score.
Write it in your own words before the feeling passes.
Repeat this in six months. The direction of movement matters more than the starting point.
Your read
The individual answers matter less than the disagreement between them. Look at the shortest bar first.
The next step
You now know which layer you cannot trust
The disagreement between your columns is the thing no internal report was ever going to volunteer. You have just made it visible.
Knowing where the gap sits and having the room to close it are two different problems. Most people finish a worksheet like this with a clear picture, a full diary and no obvious first move.
That is the conversation worth having. Twenty minutes with the Advanced Safety team, looking at what you have just written down and telling you plainly what to do first, whether it is urgent and whether you need help at all.
Twenty minutes. No pitch and no obligation. Bring your worksheet. Most useful if you carry accountability for health and safety in your organisation.
Book at go.advancedsafety.co.nz/book
Advanced Safety Ltd | advancedsafety.co.nz | From Raise the Standard: Why Good Organisations Go Blind and How Leaders Restore Visibility by Matt Jones. This worksheet is a starting version of an instrument Advanced Safety runs in full. It is general guidance, not legal advice.
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