September 25

By the time the twins had been bathed, storied and tucked in, Bobbie was exhausted. It’s been a good day, she thought to herself, just an unexpectedly busy one. Still, she had work to do as she sat on the couch, notebook in hand, staring at the list of questions she and Jim had come up with that afternoon.

She heard her husband Alex over her shoulder, using his mock ‘sexy voiceover’ tone.

“What is risk?”

“What’s the purpose of the assessment?”

“How does this support the business?”

“Mmmmmm, yeah baby.”

She started to laugh as he leaned over the back of the couch

“I didn’t know you’d taken up writing? Is this a sequel to Fifty Shades of Gray?”

She laughed and whacked him with a pillow.

“You’re a jerk.”

He flopped down next to her and pulled her in for a hug.

“But I’m your jerk. Forever and ever. You do remember promising that, right?”

“I lied. My fingers were crossed.” 

“Mine too.” He looked down at the notebook. “New project?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “Xavier wants a risk assessment of the whole business and I don’t know where to start. Jim and I were cooking up some ideas this afternoon.”

“Ah, that explains it.” Alex said.

“Explains what,” she asked suspiciously, pushing him back a bit.

“Why Jim said I need to be nice to you for the next few weeks. He invited us over for lunch on Saturday but said you and he had ‘grown up’ things to talk about.”

“Well, he’s absolutely right. You do need to be nice to me but not just for the next few weeks.”

“Whatever I can do for the best HSE Manager in the country.” Alex looked down at the notepad. “What’s that last one?”

“K.I.S.S. It’s an acronym for…” she started to explain.

“Happy to oblige.” He interrupted, pulling her close.

“You’re still a jerk….”

– – – – –

It was still dark the next morning when she sat at the kitchen counter looking at her notebook, sipping her first cup of coffee. Alex was already out for his morning run and the kids were still asleep so she could enjoy having an hour of quiet to herself.

She looked at the notes she had made the day before. 

——

She’d brainstormed with Jim for about an hour, eventually producing a few pages of notes, questions and ideas about what might pose a risk to XYZ Co. But she didn’t feel that they were any closer to working out how to approach the risk assessment. All they had was a bigger and bigger list of things they didn’t know.

Eventually, she dropped her pen and flicked through the pages and pages of yellow pad they had covered before she tossed that down too.

“This is impossible. There’s no way we can get all this done in three weeks. It’s just way too much work to pull something this complicated together in the time we have.”

Jim had sat there silently, nodding in agreement, until he suddenly grabbed the pen, opened a fresh page in the pad and started writing.

“You’re right. This isn’t enough time for something detailed and complicated. Do you remember when we rolled out the new HSE system with the updated procedures.”

She nodded. “Of course, I was the one who wrote those doorstops.”

“Right, but we didn’t just drop those on the business and tell them to implement everything at once did we? We broke it all down and took it bit by bit.”

“That’s right. We started with the big ticket items and took it from there. That’s the 80/20 rule: find the 20% of something that has the most impact.”

“I think you mean the Pareto Principle, my dear” Jim said using his know-all voice as he called it.

“Yes,” she laughed. Jim always did a good job of pretending he was a simple, hands-on oilfield guy even though he had degrees in engineering and safety management.

“But do you remember the other thing we preached?”

“Keeping it simple.”

Jim held up the notepad and turned it around to show K.I.S.S. written in big letters across the middle of the page.

“We need to do the same here. Keep it simple and focus on what’s going to produce the most return for our effort.’ He paused and corrected himself. “Your effort, I mean.”

“Right, KISS: Keep It Stupid Simple. OK, I’m onboard but that doesn’t tell us where to start.”

“Sure it does,” replied Jim, turning the pad around and starting to write again. “We need to start with the basics. We need to work out what you’re trying to achieve.”

“Remember,” he continued, “we didn’t just tell people to do things ‘because we said so’. We defined what it was we were trying to achieve with the program and how that benefited the business. We don’t know that yet so let’s start there. You figure out what Xav really wants from this process and I will do some general research.”

——

She looked back down at her list of questions and jotted down a few more. She finished off her coffee and headed to the shower. It would be mayhem shortly once the kids were up and she and Alex were getting them ready for school. 

She wasn’t sure things would be any less chaotic at work.