Why Critter Exists: Built From 27 years of H&S Practice

Why Critter Exists: Built From 27 years of H&S Practice

Key takeaway: Critter is the product of 27 years of IMPAC health and safety practice – not a software company that researched the problem and built a solution. It exists because IMPAC kept seeing the same gap: organisations with critical controls documented, and no reliable way to verify they were in place and working. Two shifts in the H&S sector made the need urgent. Critter is the answer that IMPAC’s experience made possible.

Critter exists because IMPAC – New Zealand’s leading health and safety company – spent 27 years guiding organisations through complex critical risk challenges. Helping them build systems, auditing what they had, working alongside boards and executives trying to understand their exposure and what genuine critical risk governance requires. And seeing, with striking consistency, the same underlying gap. 

Not a lack of care or absent systems, but a gap between what organisations had documented and what they could verify was in place and working. 

What the sector got right – and where most tools didn’t follow 

For much of the last two decades, health and safety performance was measured by what had already happened. Incident rates. Total recordable frequency rates. Lost-time injuries. Near-miss logs. These numbers were reported upward, discussed at board level, and used to draw conclusions about how safe an organisation was.

The problem is that they look backward. An organisation can have a low incident rate and still have critical risk controls that aren’t operating – it just hasn’t had the incident yet. The absence of incidents doesn’t tell you whether the controls that prevent them are working. It tells you how lucky you’ve been.

The H&S sector began to recognise this a little while ago. The shift toward critical risk management – focusing attention on the specific controls that stand between normal operations and a fatality – was the right response. Stop trying to monitor everything. Identify the risks that could kill someone or seriously permanently harm them, understand the critical controls that manage them, and verify that those controls are in place and working.

That shift in thinking was real and it mattered. But most of the tools organisations already had weren’t built for it. Broad H&S management systems designed to handle incidents, hazards, training records, audits, and compliance documentation were asked to carry a function they weren’t designed for. The result, in practice, was that critical risk verification ended up layered on top of systems built for something else – tracked in spreadsheets, managed through periodic audit cycles, reported in documents that made it look like coverage existed when the underlying question hadn’t really been answered.

The clutter problem

Alongside this, something else was happening. H&S management had become, for many organisations, genuinely cluttered.

Systems that had grown to cover every conceivable risk category. Processes for documenting everything, verifying little. Reporting that consumed real time and effort and produced outputs that told leadership what had been logged – but not whether the things that actually mattered were under control. H&S professionals who were capable and committed, buried under a volume of activity that made it harder, not easier, to see the risks that most needed attention.

The demand that emerged from this wasn’t for more coverage. It was for focus. What are our critical risks – the ones that could kill or seriously permanently harm someone? Are the crucial controls we’ve put in place actually in place and working? Can we see that continuously, without rebuilding the answer from scratch every quarter?

IMPAC’s approach has always been pragmatic: cut through the noise, focus on what matters, and build systems that work in the real world. That disposition is what makes the clutter problem so visible from the inside – and what shaped the thinking behind Critter.

What IMPAC built and why

Critter is the product that emerges when you’ve spent 27 years on the inside of that problem.

Not researching it, not modelling it, but guiding organisations through it – building their critical risk systems, auditing what they had in place, helping boards understand what verified health and safety governance actually looks like and where the gaps tend to be. After decades of seeing the same thing – organisations that had critical controls documented but couldn’t verify they were in place and working – IMPAC started building Critter.

The platform is built around something that IMPAC’s experience made clear: documenting a critical control and verifying it’s in place and working are not the same thing – and that the gap between them is where serious incidents happen.

These aren’t insights from a product design process. They’re observations from 27 years of H&S practice, distilled into the structure of a platform.

That experience is also what shaped the platform’s central metric. The Critter Effectiveness Score is a continuously updated measure of critical control effectiveness across an organisation – aggregated from the verification activity being carried out at the operational level, and expressed in a form that boards and executives can engage with directly. Once the foundational work is in place – knowing what your critical risks are and having the right critical controls established – it’s the only critical risk reporting you need. If that foundational work hasn’t been done yet, this is where to start; IMPAC’s training and consulting services are built around exactly that.

What that means for the organisations using it

Every design decision in Critter reflects something IMPAC learned from working inside the problem.

The focus on critical risk rather than broad H&S management reflects what the sector has figured out – that coverage of everything is not the same as control of what matters. The verification framework reflects the legal obligation that case law says exists under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015: officers must verify that critical risk systems – and ultimately critical controls – are working, not simply establish them and assume.

When an organisation uses Critter, they’re not getting a product from a team that researched these problems. They’re getting a platform built by the people who’ve spent 27 years guiding organisations through them – and who built Critter specifically because they kept seeing where the gap was and what it cost.

What that means in practice is that Critter isn’t only useful at the governance level, even though that’s where the legal obligation sits. The ops manager who can see their critical controls are verified as working has something the quarterly H&S report doesn’t provide: confirmation, not assumption. The H&S champion has a record they can stand behind when leadership asks whether controls are effective. And the board has the basis for exercising the officer duty as it’s actually defined – not receiving assurance, but verifying. The same platform, read differently depending on where in the organisation you’re standing.

There’s a version of this question worth asking about any tool supporting critical risk management and critical control verification: was it built by people who understand the problem from the outside, or from the inside? For Critter, that question has a straightforward answer.

Critter is built by IMPAC – New Zealand’s leading health and safety company, with 27 years of experience guiding organisations through complex critical risk challenges. Learn more about IMPAC.