I strongly agree with this article by David Patterson.
In particular, his description of sport organizations as being simultaneously very large and very small puts words to something I’ve experienced repeatedly, but never quite articulated this way — including in the context of sexual abuse risk management.
Sport has long lived with this paradox. As Patterson describes, organizations with modest budgets and small national offices nonetheless carry enormous social, cultural, and human responsibility. They reach deep into communities, shape the lives of children and families, and are expected to operate with a level of care and credibility usually associated with far larger institutions.
That framing turns out to be especially helpful when thinking about sexual abuse risk. Many of the tensions organizations experience around safeguarding don’t stem from a lack of commitment or effort, but from trying to manage a fundamentally big-small system with tools designed for big-big organizations, not big-small ones.
Sport Organizations Are Big — Really Big
Sport organizations are undeniably big.
They have enormous reach, deep community roots, and profound influence on children, families, and national culture. Expectations reflect that scale. They are expected to deliver excellence, fairness, inclusion, safety, and trust — often across the entire country — and to do so visibly and credibly.
That includes expectations around sexual abuse risk. The tolerance for failure is rightly low. Scrutiny is ongoing. Boards, regulators, insurers, funders, parents, and the public expect systems that don’t just respond after harm, but actively work to prevent it.
From the outside, those expectations look like the expectations we place on very large institutions.
And Yet — Sport Organizations Are Also Small
And yet, as Patterson explains so clearly, most sports organizations are operationally small.
A national governing body may have only a relative handful of paid staff. Delivery happens almost entirely through volunteers — coaches, officials, team managers, committee members — dispersed across thousands of local contexts. Oversight is light. Control is indirect. Discretion is not a flaw; it is a defining feature of the system.
That matters for safeguarding, because discretion and judgment are not incidental in sexual abuse risk management — they are central.
Sexual abuse risk is rarely managed through mechanical controls alone. It is managed through human judgment in ambiguous situations: noticing boundary drift, responding to uncertainty, and making sense of signals that don’t fit neatly into rules. In this sense, the big–small structure of sport organizations actually aligns with how sexual abuse risk must be managed in practice.
And Yet — Safeguarding Has Been Built Around Assurance
And yet, despite this alignment, sexual abuse risk management in sport has largely followed a compliance- and assurance-based model.
Policies. Criminal background checks. Mandatory training. Codes of conduct. Certifications. Audits. Accreditation.
None of this is ill-intentioned. Much of it reflects genuine effort and hard-won progress.
But assurance-based approaches are designed for environments where behavior can be standardized and enforced. In volunteer-driven systems, they often create confidence at the center while leaving uncertainty unmanaged at the edge — where most real risk lives.
More subtly, they introduce a contradiction.
Contribution Everywhere — Except in Risk Management
Across almost every other aspect of sport, contributors are asked to lean in.
Coaches are trusted to adapt practice to local needs. Officials are expected to exercise judgment. Volunteers are encouraged to show initiative, solve problems, and embody the organization’s values. Governance structures are designed to capture voice, insight, and lived experience.
But when it comes to sexual abuse risk management, those same people are often treated primarily as compliance subjects.
People comply when required, but an unintended psychological consequence can be a gradual reduction in noticing, questioning, and reflection in the moments that matter most.
This is not because people don’t care, but because the system asks them to behave differently here than everywhere else.
What Changes When People Are Treated as Contributors
When contributors are treated as active participants in risk management, the experience is fundamentally different.
They are invited to notice uncertainty, reflect on real situations, and help shape better ways of working. They are trusted to exercise judgment, supported to build confidence, and connected to a shared purpose that extends beyond compliance.
Risk management becomes something people use in their day-to-day roles, not something imposed on them from outside.
In practical terms, contributors are asked:
- What feels uncertain here?
- Where do boundaries get blurry?
- What would make this situation safer, clearer, or more resilient?
That invitation aligns with why people contribute in the first place. It supports autonomy rather than suppressing it, builds competence rather than assuming it, and strengthens connection to the organization’s mission rather than isolating safeguarding as a separate, compliance-only activity.
And Yet — Risk Management Solved This Problem Years Ago
What’s striking is that this tension is not new in risk management more broadly.
Around twenty-five years ago, traditional compliance-based risk management was recognized as insufficient for complex, human-driven systems. In response, best practice shifted toward Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) — reframing risk as uncertainty around objectives and emphasizing judgment, learning, and integration over control and proof.
ERM emerged precisely because checklists and assurance alone could not manage complex risk.
And Yet — ERM Was Built for Big–Big Organizations
And yet, ERM was largely developed for organizations that are big in footprint and big at the center: corporations, financial institutions, and large public bodies with formal hierarchies, data infrastructure, and dedicated risk functions.
Sport organizations don’t fit that profile. They are big in impact, but small in capacity. Asking them to “implement ERM” often means importing structures that assume scale, authority, and resources they simply don’t have.
So while ERM is conceptually right, it has often been practically out of reach.
Re-imagining ERM for the Big–Small Reality
Seen this way, the challenge is not whether ERM applies to sport, but how it must be adapted.
This is the gap Jigsaw was designed to address.
Jigsaw re-imagines enterprise risk management for organizations that are big in reach but small at the center — where responsibility is widely distributed, discretion is unavoidable, and judgment is the primary control.
It does so through three deliberate shifts.
First, use comes before build.
Organizations don’t design a comprehensive system upfront and then try to roll it out. They start by using the system in one real area of uncertainty and allow structure to develop as it proves useful.
Second, uncertainty is made workable.
Jigsaw centers the core ERM loop — identifying uncertainty, designing controls, testing them in practice, monitoring outcomes, and reviewing learning — in a way that works at any scale. Decisions and adaptations are captured alongside outcomes, making learning visible rather than theoretical.
Third, assurance is reframed as defensibility and capability.
Rather than relying solely on proof that requirements were met, confidence comes from being able to show how decisions were made, how learning occurred, and how prevention and capability improved over time.
Why This Matters
This matters because sexual abuse risk is not primarily controlled by policies, training modules, or certifications, but by how people notice uncertainty and exercise judgment day to day. Boundaries rarely fail all at once; they erode through small decisions made under pressure, ambiguity, and competing priorities.
If a risk management system sidelines judgment — or treats it as something to be constrained rather than supported — it weakens the very control it depends on most. Systems that invite people to notice uncertainty, exercise judgment, and learn from experience are not softer; they are stronger. Over time, they build prevention that is tested in practice, improved through use, and credible precisely because it reflects how safeguarding actually happens day to day.
Big and Small, Done Right
The article closes with a powerful insight: doing the right small things enables the right big things to happen.
Effective sexual abuse risk management depends on exactly the same logic.
Not compliance systems imposed on volunteer cultures.
Not scaled-down versions of corporate ERM.
But systems that respect discretion, harness contribution, and grow only where uncertainty demands it.
That approach doesn’t dilute rigor — it shifts rigor from proving compliance to building, testing, and improving prevention over time, much like how sport itself improves through coaching, practice, and development.
And for organizations that are both big and small, it may be the only way risk management can truly work.
