23rd April 2026
I want to expand on a topic so expertly brought up by James Bulley in his article on the Strategy-Delivery Gap.
With the Section 27 guidance now published, and the Security Industry Authority’s Section 12 consultation starting to take shape, a lot of the pent-up conversation around #MartynsLaw has begun to surface. It’s been evident in recent discussions across the sector, particularly on social media. With the upcoming @Martyn’s Law Forum webinar on the 21st May it’ll hopefully put some context into the Responsibility for Legal Requirements.
Questions around what is “reasonably practicable”, how roles like the Responsible Person and Senior Individual operate in practice and what good actually looks like in delivery are now front and centre.
Much of that conversation is rightly focused on the Responsible Person.
Who holds the role – What it requires – How it is defined
But as soon as that definition is applied to a real event or venue, the question quickly shifts.
Not just: “Who is the Responsible Person?” But: “How does responsibility actually work here?” Because in practice, events don’t operate in fixed conditions.
They operate in environments where:
And that’s where another layer starts to come into view.
Not a failure of responsibility. Not a failure of structure. But something more fundamental.
The Visibility Gap
Not a failure of strategy. Not a failure of delivery. But a gap in what people can actually see and therefore act on as events evolve. Strategy doesn’t usually disappear outright. It gets harder to see. As delivery progresses, teams quite naturally move into tactical and operational modes (in the true sense).
Decisions become quicker paced. Priorities become localised or siloed. Pressure increases. And gradually, the connection back to the original ‘why’ starts to fade. Not because people don’t care about it but because the picture they are working from becomes partial or obscured.
I saw this early on in my time at the Royal Horticultural Society, when we brought the shows team together to map out both innovation and direction at a time when the environment was shifting.
A lot of the work was already being done well, but not everyone could see where it was heading or had a clear view of the direction for the Shows Department.
I used the analogy of building a cathedral.
The risk in any complex operation is that teams become highly effective bricklayers, but without a clear sense of the cathedral they are collectively trying to build.
Once that picture was shared, something shifted. Not the work itself but how it was understood and how decisions were made against it. The Visibility Gap doesn’t always present itself as a visibility problem. It shows up in other, more familiar ways.
But underneath all of these is often the same root cause: a fragmented or incomplete picture, because control doesn’t just sit in structures or roles.
It sits in the decisions people make based on what they can see.
I saw a different side of this during the British Military Tournament, a fast-moving, highly complex event where decisions were often needed quickly but had many dependencies.
There was a natural tendency for those decisions to be made unilaterally, in isolation, simply to keep pace. But that came with risk. Not necessarily of making the wrong decision, but of decisions becoming disconnected from the broader intent and from each other.
We introduced a simple discipline: ‘no unilateral decisions’.
Not to slow things down unnecessarily, but to create just enough space to reconnect decisions back to the why, and to the constraints that mattered, including budget and delivery integrity.
In effect, it was a way of protecting visibility under pressure.
Which brings us back to a more fundamental question: What’s the picture people are working from?
And just as importantly: Is it the same picture?
This is where the conversation around responsibility starts to intersect with something more practical. Because the real challenge isn’t just defining the Responsible Person. It’s ensuring that the person and the system around them has sufficient visibility to act with confidence and in alignment with the original intent.
That’s what keeps control anchored to the ‘why’. Without it, even well-defined roles can start to operate in isolation. Not because they are wrong, but because the environment they are operating in is not fully visible. This isn’t about knowing everything, it’s about knowing enough and making sure that “enough” is shared.
The question isn’t just:
“Who is the Responsible Person?”
It’s:
“How does responsibility actually work here and does the picture support it?”
Interested to hear how others see this playing out across their own events and environments.
