They both have to think several moves ahead in their activities. For chess players, the game is a test of their ability to think ahead and to plan several moves in advance. For fire risk assessors, they have to think ahead to prevent fires from starting and to assess the risk of fires starting at a given location. Both of these people have to be good at thinking ahead and have to be able to anticipate outcomes of their decisions.
The chess player who thinks only one move ahead loses. The state of the game board now is only relevant to the extent that it determines what will become possible or impossible five, ten, fifteen moves into the game. The player who thinks several moves ahead of their opponent controls the game. They know not just what happens now but also what each decision will enable or prevent later in the game. The pieces are not being moved from one square to another. The possibilities of the game are being managed.
The fire risk assessor that only thinks one move ahead of the fire also loses. The stakes are higher and the setting is completely different from the chess game, but the discipline is notably similar. For Fire Risk Assessment Bristol, visit keloscape.co.uk/areas-we-cover/fire-safety-consultancy-bristol/
The fire risk assessment is not just a checklist of visible defects in the building. The assessment must be done to determine how the building would behave in the event of a fire. This assessment is done in reverse, determining what elements of the building would make the fire more dangerous or reduce its danger. This type of thinking is required to perform the risk assessment and is similar to that required to play the game of chess.
The fire door propped open is not just a defect in the building. It is a failure in the compartmentalisation of the building that will change how smoke and flame travel through the building in the initial minutes of a fire. In this time, the majority of other safety measures either work to protect the building and those within it or do not. The individual who writes down the propped door as a defect in the building has only looked at the individual component of the building that is faulty. The individual who thinks about how that door affects the building’s evacuation plan, the time in which people must escape the building and the people on the floors above the faulty door are all thinking in sequences about the building.
The best fire risk assessors think through these sequences in a systematic way. They ask what is wrong while fire spread, as well as what would happen if that problem were to continue to happen. They also think through where the risks of fire would spread and what would happen as a result of that spread.