The Psychosocial Risk Model has a Blind Spot

 Organisations survey their workforce, identify key themes, and deploy programs to address them. Rigorous. Well-intentioned. And built entirely around the average employee.

But the average employee doesn't exist. 

Take a common finding - lack of role clarity. The organisation responds with structured role definition. Helpful for many. But for the employee who thrives on autonomy, increased structure may feel suffocating. The intervention solves a population-level problem while potentially creating a personal one.

This isn't a flaw in the data. It's a limitation of what aggregate data can do.

I anticipate the pushback: individualised approaches don't scale, and risk shifting responsibility back onto the individual rather than fixing the conditions that are causing harm.

It's a fair challenge and worth being direct about.

Fixing systemic problems must always come first. If workloads are unsustainable, the answer is resourcing - not resilience training. Individual support should never substitute for addressing the conditions that create psychosocial risk.

But even in genuinely healthy workplaces, people bring different histories, vulnerabilities, and skill gaps to the same environment. No amount of systemic improvement dissolves those individual differences and pretending otherwise leaves people without the support they actually need.

The better model uses population-level insight as a diagnostic foundation, then asks: given these conditions, what does THIS person need to thrive within them?

The organisational context is shared. The intervention is personalised. We already apply this logic to leadership development, career planning, and performance support.

The case for extending it to psychosocial wellbeing is compelling and overdue.