The Writing Dilemma: Off-the-Record Risks

To Write It Down or Not

A recurring organisational dilemma concerns what should be written down. Think about a committee meeting or a steering group. When it makes decisions, you might expect to see a report or presentation sent to its members beforehand, discussing the pros and cons of a course of action and then a minute recording what was decided.

But there may be several things that were said ‘behind the scenes’ that won't ever make it into the written record of the proposal or the final decision. Many of the points discussed before, during and after a committee meeting may be unimportant, but you may have a situation where some managers had grave concerns about a proposal and expressed these concerns in the meeting, but the meeting minutes don't reflect this.

To counter this, managers with concerns may decide to put their reservations in writing. However, the written expression of ‘dissenting’ views can have a consequence for working relationships and may constitute a risk because the document might make its way into the public domain (whether through a legal process or an unauthorised leak), creating another problem for the organisation. In other words, committing things to writing seems to solve one problem. Still, it may, in some circumstances, create a spin‐off problem.

In many countries around the world, you will see ‘freedom of information’ legislation. Its goal is to promote transparency and accountability in government and other organisations so that members of the public, journalists and other interest groups can access data and information of interest. In many instances, this has been a positive step forward, but – as a result – it's an open secret that many organisations are now much more cautious about what they put into writing in the first place.

The same applies to risk management activities. Some risks are embarrassing, such as ‘the senior project manager is out of their depth and needs to be replaced’, or risks that may be sensitive from a regulatory perspective. Therefore, they may not be written down at all or perhaps only in vague, coded terms. This doesn't mean the organisation will be doing nothing on these issues, but it's important to recognise this happens.

So, the question ‘What are the “off the record” risks? And what is being done about them?’ needs to be faced by senior managers from time to time. Otherwise, you might see a major project setback and uncover that the steering group was not adequately resolving problems with the project manager, who was out of their depth. This is a classic example of an ‘open secret’ which could be addressed but often is not until it's too late.

These choices also arise when organisations must allocate limited resources or weigh competing risks.

The author uses the CV19 pandemic as a broader example of trade-offs. Restrictions intended to reduce pressure on hospitals also disrupted schooling, social contact, and businesses. Assessing their consequences requires distinguishing the effects of restrictions from those of the pandemic itself. The book discusses these choices from its own period of writing. Long COVID refers to ongoing health effects; the wider social and economic consequences are a separate issue.

For future decisions, make the expected benefits, possible harms, resource limits, and time horizons explicit. Agree on what evidence would justify revisiting the decision, especially when some consequences may be difficult to reverse.

Resource constraints can affect several parts of a problem:

1. You may not be able to identify the optimal design you need for a new building, facility, process, crisis management plan, etc., without engaging the right operational staff and using expert help (which takes time and costs money).
2. You are unlikely to have an optimal build quality or a resilience capability, if you don't have the resources and materials to invest in building, materials and supplies, keeping things in good order, etc.
3. You are unlikely to be able to optimise the organisation's human resources unless you can pay competitive salaries and invest in staff training and development, etc.

And it should be no surprise that political behaviour is often closely associated with budget and resource discussions, after all, ‘Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth’.