Last week the Government announced another national lockdown that will be in place into early December. In what is starting to feel like a brief intermission between lockdowns, we did some company planning to help us understand and deal with the risks we’re facing during these uncertain times. What we came up with is what we’re calling our Risk Matrix.

We’ve divided up all our different activities across 6 levels of risk, going from ‘COVID not present’ to ‘Risk of Touretteshero being overwhelmed’. The first five levels relate exactly to the Government’s old 5 tier alert system, we added the 6th to address what might happen within our company specifically at the extreme end.

Of course, in true government style, they have since changed their alert system, reducing it to three tiers – so, not to be defeated, we included these at the top of the sheet, so we know what we’re doing in relation to what they’re saying. We’ve put a lot of work into this on the understanding that it will probably be relevant to one degree or another for the next couple of years!

So, when we had an emergency planning meeting about the new lockdown last Thursday, it was a huge relief to find that the matrix was a really helpful starting point for all our decision making.

The version we created contains lots of information that relates to our company, but we’ve made a template version which you can download here in case you think it might be useful for you. We think this could work for individuals, families or companies and hope that it helps make complex decisions easier even when times are so hard. Let us know what you think.