Change Management in Risk Management: Understanding Cause and Effect
- Jessica Urquhart
- 22 hours ago
- 4 min read
Change is constant in every workplace. Tasks evolve, environments shift, people come and go, and technology continues to advance. But when these changes aren’t properly managed, even the best risk management systems can unravel.
In high-risk industries, poor change management is one of the most common, and underestimated, causes of serious incidents. The problem isn’t always the change itself. It’s the failure to understand and manage the cause and effect that follows.
Why Change Management Matters in Risk Management
Every change, no matter how minor, alters the balance of risk. Changing a task, a piece of equipment, a work environment, or even one person’s role can unintentionally weaken existing defences.
Effective change management helps you identify those ripple effects before they turn into consequences. It ensures that critical controls remain in place, performance standards are still met, and that people understand what has changed and why.
When change isn’t managed systematically, latent failures begin to build, and those failures often stay hidden until something goes wrong.
Cause and Effect: The Chain Reaction of Change
In risk management, every cause has an effect. Removing or modifying one element of a system can trigger an entire chain of consequences. Let’s look at a few examples:
Changing the task: A new procedure might streamline the job, but if it bypasses a verification step or shortens the inspection period, a control may no longer function as intended.
Changing the environment: Relocating equipment outdoors to save space might expose it to weather conditions that affect its integrity or performance.
Changing the person: Reassigning a task to someone without the same competency, authorisation, or experience can reduce control reliability - especially if they don’t recognise the associated hazards.
Changing a critical control: This is where change management is most vital. If a critical control, for example, an isolation point, an interlock, or a monitoring system is modified or removed, you must immediately assess the risk impact. Critical controls are the last line of defence preventing catastrophic outcomes. Losing even one can shift the organisation’s entire risk profile.
Each of these examples demonstrates the same principle: change creates vulnerability when its effects aren’t traced and tested.
The Hidden Risk of Poor Change Management
When change management is reactive rather than proactive, controls drift. Over time, the system you think is protecting you may not reflect the reality of your operations.
Common indicators of poor change management include:
Temporary fixes that become permanent
Unapproved or undocumented procedural changes
Equipment substitutions without reassessment
Personnel rotations without refresher training
A gap between “work as imagined” and “work as done”
Each of these signals that a change has occurred, but without adequate evaluation or verification. This is often how incidents begin: not with a sudden failure, but with an accumulation of unnoticed adjustments.
Managing Change the Right Way
Change management should be integrated into your risk and critical control management process, not treated as a separate activity. Every change, whether operational, organisational, or procedural, should trigger a risk review that considers:
What is changing? Define the scope. Is it a process, a person, a piece of plant, or a control?
Why is it changing? Understand the drivers behind the change. Cost, efficiency, compliance, or safety improvements.
What could go wrong? Revisit your bowtie or risk register. Identify which threats, unwanted events, and consequences may be affected.
Which controls are impacted? Determine whether existing controls still function as intended and whether any are now ineffective or obsolete.
Who needs to know? Communicate the change clearly, ensuring affected personnel are trained, competent, and understand the new expectations.
How will effectiveness be verified? Update verification templates, audit schedules, and performance standards to ensure continued assurance.
A well-designed change management process ensures that every modification, no matter how small, goes through a logical, traceable review before implementation.
Consultation: A Legal and Practical Requirement
Under WHS legislation, consulting with workers who may be affected by a change isn’t optional, it’s a legal obligation. Workers are the people who understand the task best and involving them early provides valuable insights into how a change will really play out in practice.
Benefits of consultation include:
Identifying unforeseen risks or interactions between tasks and controls
Building trust and shared ownership of risk decisions
Improving the quality and acceptance of new processes or systems
Strengthening safety culture and accountability
Who to consult with:
Workers directly affected by the change
Health and Safety Representatives (HSRs)
Supervisors and team leaders
Contractors or others sharing the work environment
If consultation doesn’t occur, risks increase significantly. Workers may not understand the new expectations, bypass new controls, or continue using outdated methods. This can lead to confusion, resistance or even deliberate workarounds, all of which undermine the effectiveness of controls and increase the likelihood of incidents.
Other risks of poor consultation can extend to the overall culture of the business, where workers don’t trust management, changes fail to be implemented correctly and people become disengaged from the risk management process, viewing it as something that’s done to them rather than done with them. Over time, this erodes accountability, weakens communication and creates the perfect conditions for serious incidents to occur.
Change Without Control = Risk
If a business can’t track and assess change, it can’t manage risk effectively. Change without control is simply risk reintroduced into the system.
Critical controls are designed for a reason. They prevent or mitigate events that can cause fatalities, serious injuries or catastrophic losses. When these controls are changed, bypassed or removed without proper analysis, it’s not just a procedural oversight, it’s a breakdown of the entire risk management framework.
Before You Implement Change
Before you roll out that new process, piece of equipment, or system upgrade, pause and ask:
Has this change been risk assessed?
Which critical controls could be affected?
Have verification activities been updated?
Do workers understand what’s changing and why?
Managing change isn’t about slowing down progress, it’s about ensuring that improvement doesn’t come at the cost of safety, reliability or compliance.
