In most laboratories, "risk assessment" has narrowed to a single artifact: the color-coded grid, severity on one axis and probability on the other. It is fast, familiar, and reassuringly definitive—and that is the problem, because a grid that always produces a clean answer can lull a team into false certainty and obscure the human factors it was never built to capture. Few people have thought harder about that trap than Jonathan Klane, who has directed safety for hundreds of research labs, advises as a principal consultant with the global sustainability consultancy ERM, and is now a PhD candidate at Arizona State University studying how stories shape risk perception. Speaking at the Lab Manager Leadership Summit, Klane guided participants through roughly 17 risk tools and techniques, each paired with a hands-on exercise, with a single message: the grid is one tool among many, and leaning on it alone is how labs talk themselves into trouble.
The point, Klane stressed, was not to find the single best technique but to build fluency across many.
Stop hunting for the perfect tool
The instinct to find the single best method is, in Klane's experience, the most common way lab managers stall. They agonize over which technique is correct rather than simply starting. His advice was to flip that instinct entirely: assume no tool is perfect, reach for several, and treat the exercise as a way to think rather than a box to check.
Jonathan Klane, MSEd, CIH, CSP, CHMM, CIT, storytelling consultant.
He went further, warning managers against the comfort of using just one approach. "Don't limit yourself to just one risk tool or technique to assess risk," he said. Combining methods, in his view, did more than add coverage—it changed the quality of the analysis. Applying several could be "very synergistic," he noted, "not additive, where it's just like stacking them, but by combining you get . . . extra benefits." For a lab manager weighing a new process, that meant a two-factor matrix to compare options, a what-if to surface failure modes, and a premortem to confront the worst case might together reveal what any one of them would miss.
Risk is a human construct, not a natural phenomenon
The deeper reframe Klane offered was philosophical, but it carried direct operational consequences. He opened the workshop not with a tool but with a question—What is risk?—and used the scattered answers ("possibility," "what can go wrong," "threat to value") to make a point lab managers rarely pause on.
"Risk is a human construct, it's not a natural phenomenon," he said. "We created the concept, the idea of risk." Hazards exist independently of us, danger exists, yet risk only emerges once a person is present to perceive a threat to something they value. The implication for lab managers, he argued, was that an assessment focused entirely on chemicals and equipment assesses only half the picture. As Klane put it, drawing on his doctoral program in the human and social dimensions of science and technology, lab risk is "much more about the humans than it is about the technology."
That was why he urged lab managers to ask three questions:
- Severity—How bad could the outcome be? Could someone be seriously injured or killed?
- Exposure—How close is the person to the hazard, and is there a barrier between them?
- Probability—How likely is the event to actually happen?
Many assessments drop the middle one. Klane did not demand all three, but he refused to let anyone tell him exposure could not stand alone. "I've had people tell me you can't use that third one, John, and I'm like, I can if I want. There isn't a law."
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The risk assessment matrix is useful—just don't trust its precision
None of this meant abandoning the familiar grid. Klane was candid that the risk assessment matrix earns its place: it is easy to build, easy to share, and genuinely good for comparing risks or presenting them to a group. The mistake, he said, was treating its output as exact.
"Beyond that, it doesn't tell you a lot of . . . well, now what do I do?" he said. Worse, the numbers wobble. Borrowing the idea of test-retest variability from his years administering hearing tests, Klane reminded managers that the same risk, rated twice, can land in two places. "If you ask three lab safety professionals to rate a risk, you're going to get five different answers." The lesson was to use the grid for what it does well and resist the temptation to over-interpret a single score.
Its real value, he argued, lay in directing attention. Low-severity, low-probability nuisances—the perpetual paper cuts—deserve almost none of a manager's time. The quadrant that should command it is the one that is severe but unlikely, precisely because it unsettles us. "The human brain does not like uncertainty," Klane said. "It loathes, it abhors uncertainty, it craves certainty." Lab managers who understand that pull, he suggested, will spend their energy where it belongs instead of where it feels most comfortable.
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Exposure is the factor lab managers can actually control
If there was one practical upgrade Klane wanted lab managers to make to their risk assessment process, it was to pull exposure out of the shadows. In the standard two-factor model it gets folded into probability and disappears. Treated on its own—severity times exposure times probability—it becomes the lever managers can most directly pull.
Exposure is about proximity, literal or figurative: how close a person is to a hazard, and whether a barrier sits between them. "Distance is your friend," Klane said, pointing to how energy from radiation or noise drops off with distance. But a fume hood sash, a respirator, or an explosion shield changes exposure regardless of how likely an incident is. His exercises isolated the variable on purpose. Swapping leaded for non-leaded solder moves severity; moving from an open bench to a HEPA-filtered hood moves exposure. The discipline of asking which factor a given control actually changes—rather than assuming it changes everything—was what he said separates a considered intervention from a reflexive one.
Most lab controls are human
That human emphasis ran straight through the hierarchy of hazard controls, the ranked ladder of safety measures from most to least effective:
- Elimination—Remove the hazard entirely
- Substitution—Replace it with something less dangerous (for example, swapping leaded for non-leaded solder)
- Engineering controls—Isolate people from the hazard with fume hoods, biosafety cabinets, or enclosures
- Work practices—Habits and behaviors that reduce exposure
- Administrative controls—Policies, procedures, training, signs, and labels
- Personal protective equipment (PPE)—The last line of defense, and the least effective
Klane drew a line through the middle of it that many lab managers overlook.
"There's a break right here under engineering controls. The rest are human when you think about it." Work practices are habits. Administrative controls—policies, procedures, training, signs, labels—all depend on a person reading and following them. And PPE sits at the bottom for a reason: when it fails, and it does, "the hazard is going to be hitting the person." For labs that lean heavily on training and written procedures, he warned, that ranking is a quiet reminder of how fragile those measures are. It also reframed substitution as one of the most powerful moves available—keeping the process intact while collapsing the severity of what could go wrong.
Running backward-looking tools forward
Some of Klane's most useful guidance was about time. Familiar techniques like root cause analysis look backward from an incident; Klane ran them in reverse. Instead of "How did Sam get exposed?" he asked "How might Sam get exposed?"—placing the team before the event, where they can still change the outcome.
He applied the same skepticism to the "five whys," cautioning that "there is no magic to the number five" and that repeatedly asking why puts people on the defensive. His substitute was gentler and more revealing: trade "why" for "how" or "what." "How did this happen? Because that's so relatively benign," he said. And the first question after any incident, he insisted, is never about cause—it is "Are you okay? How are you?" Lab managers, he warned, should never tell a shaken researcher they could have died: "No one knows what it's like to die." Understanding what happened, he said, should never come at the cost of the people who lived it.
The most dangerous phrase in the lab
For surfacing hidden failure modes, Klane favored the what-if. By stipulating that something has happened, the technique sets probability aside and frees a team to explore consequences and barriers through open dialogue rather than debate over odds.
The signal that the conversation had died, he said, was the colleague who keeps repeating, "It won't happen, it won't happen." That is rarely a real judgment. "The human brain hates uncertainty. It likes certainty. So to say it won't happen . . . it's self-protective." A participant at the workshop supplied the diagnosis Klane embraced: most catastrophes trace back to a simple failure of imagination. Lab managers who hear that phrase in a planning meeting, he said, should treat it as a flag, not a conclusion.
Confront the worst case directly
Two techniques captured Klane's philosophy most fully. The bow tie maps a central "top event"—the moment control is lost—with hazards and prevention barriers feeding in and consequences and response measures flowing out, layered like slices of Swiss cheese so the holes are less likely to align.
The premortem went further. Where a postmortem examines a death after the fact, a premortem assumes it: "If this experiment kills someone, what will have caused it?" Accepting the worst outcome as given strips away probability and forces a team to confront severity and exposure head-on. Klane grounded the method in real names—Sheri Sangji, Karen Wetterhahn, and others. Wetterhahn, a heavy-metals expert who handled her own most dangerous work because she understood its toxicity, died believing her latex gloves protected her. They did not. It was a reminder, he said, that hazard identification and risk assessment are not the same thing: "Hazard is all about severity, but is not really about exposure and probability. Those are risk."
Culture decides whether any of it works
None of these tools function in a culture that punishes honesty. Klane invoked the line often attributed to Peter Drucker that "culture eats strategy for breakfast" and pointed to Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, where the most effective teams are, counterintuitively, the ones reporting the most incidents—because they treat near misses as material to learn from rather than hide.
Training, meanwhile, was a weaker lever than managers hope. "Training is a terrible tool to change behaviors," Klane said, relaying a colleague's verdict he shares. Most of it is informational, and information rarely changes what people do.
The closing charge to lab managers was not to master one method but to build fluency across many and combine them with the people who will work in the space in mind. Klane's key takeaways for lab managers were:
- Use more than one tool: No single technique is perfect, and combining methods can be synergistic rather than merely additive.
- Any assessment beats none: Don't let the search for the "right" tool stall the work—perfection is the enemy of progress.
- Separate out exposure: It is the factor managers can most directly control through barriers and distance.
- Run backward-looking tools forward: Ask "how might this happen?" before an incident, not just "how did it?" after.
- Stay open: Welcome disagreement, uncertainty, and the close calls and near misses that hold the most learning.
- Build a culture of safety: Tools fail in an environment that punishes honesty; psychological safety lets people report problems early.
- Share stories: Humans are wired to perceive risk through narrative, making a well-told account of what went wrong one of the most powerful risk tools of all.
Taken together, these principles point away from the false comfort of a single risk assessment grid and toward something harder but more honest: a lab manager who reaches for several tools, keeps the conversation open, and never loses sight of the people the assessment is meant to protect. That, more than any one technique, is what keeps a lab safe.
