Tackling risk by changing behaviour.

The need to ensure quality in its widest sense and, within this, to avoid risk or to manage the consequences of risk means that staff must be able to change or maintain their behaviour to produce safe procedures and good outcomes. This inevitably entails perceiving potential risks, devising and following systems which eliminate or minimise these risks, and devising approaches which reduce the effects of accidents when they do occur. How people's behaviour may be changed towards these goals depends to some extent on the types of changes that are required. At their most general these will be the same for risk management as those in any other sphere of organisational life. In his book on chaos theory and its use within organisations Stacey categorised change according to how easy it is to predict its cause and effects.' This can be usefully applied to the risks involved, resulting in three categories, as follows.