How Tech is Raising Standards - Kath Hipwell on using Data to Elevate Safety Standards

Kath Hipwell spent her career in brand strategy, working at large advertising agencies and inside the BBC on brands including The Times and the Sunday Times. She also spent some of it selling orange juice to children, which is her shorthand for the part of agency life she wanted to leave behind. She set up her own agency on the principle of only working with people she would sit around a campfire with, and is now CEO of the Association of British Climbing Walls, which sets the national safety standards for around 250 climbing walls across the UK. In this episode she talks to Rob Woodhead about replacing a static incident reporting system with a live one, why near misses matter more than accidents, and what she learned choosing a development partner as a self-described non-technical leader.

Key takeaways

• Recording incidents satisfies a legal duty; making that data live and comparable is what actually reduces future accidents.
• Near-miss data is more valuable than accident data, because it describes the failures that were narrowly avoided rather than only the ones that landed.
• Mapping where incidents happen inside a facility surfaces physical causes that individual reports never reveal, such as a problem with matting in one area.
• A procurement team should contain both a technical and a non-technical reviewer, because each notices things the other does not.
• The most valuable feature in the finished product came from the non-technical client, not the technical team.
• Self-regulation works as a strategy when an industry stays visibly ahead of the standards an external regulator would otherwise impose.
• Strategy is as much about deciding what you will not do as what you will, a principle carried over from editorial positioning at the BBC.
• Inclusive representation matters even in incidental illustration, because default imagery quietly signals who a sport is for.

Episode chapters

• 00:59  From advertising agencies and the BBC to her own practice
• 02:43  Moving into climbing and leading on inclusion
• 03:48  What the Association of British Climbing Walls actually does
• 05:02  What brand strategy brings to a chief executive role
• 07:13  Building in the open, and how much to tell members
• 09:34  Why new standards go through member workshops first
• 10:15  Why the incident reporting tool needed replacing
• 11:29  From static spreadsheets to live data visualisation
• 13:52  Choosing a development partner as a non-technical leader
• 15:00  The interactive body form, and what a non-technical client contributes
• 17:11  Five-fold uptake, and the improvements you only find in the wild
• 19:13  Insurance, legal duties and having everything in one place
• 20:33  Staying ahead of external regulation
• 21:44  Career pathways, apprenticeships and inclusion
• 23:48  Why the illustrations do not show rippling bodies
• 26:28  Approaching a million regular climbers in England
• 28:14  Olympic gold, and a new national ranking system
• 29:54  What Kath wishes people understood about the ABC

What does the Association of British Climbing Walls do?

The ABC is a trade association representing around 250 climbing walls across the UK. Its central function is setting the national safety standards, which cover professionalism, the structure of climbing walls, how staff operate, and safeguarding.

Those standards do two jobs at once. They protect customers by making facilities safer, and they protect the industry by reducing accidents. Kath is pointed about the alternative: other activity sectors without comparable standards have found themselves in effectively uninsurable positions, alongside the kind of serious accidents that end up in the newspapers. British climbing has self-regulated reasonably well, largely because operators bought into the standards rather than having them imposed.

The association recently added an accreditation scheme, giving walls a formal mark of quality that also helps with insurance. Kath’s analogy is the Food Standards Agency hygiene rating: most people would not eat somewhere displaying one star, and the same visible signal can drive standards upwards in climbing.

One point of vocabulary matters throughout. The word the industry avoids is safe. Nothing is safe, including crossing the road. The work is reducing risk and making things safer than they were.

Why replace an incident reporting system that already worked?

Because recording data and being able to act on it are different things.

The previous system collected incidents into an online repository that could be exported as a spreadsheet. It was, in Kath’s word, static. It satisfied the requirement to document, and it told nobody anything useful while there was still time to change something.

The replacement is built around live data. A climbing wall can see what is happening in its own facility day to day, what kinds of incidents are occurring, and how that benchmarks against the wider industry. The feature Kath singles out is spatial: operators can see where in their facility incidents are happening. If one area produces more injuries, that points at something physical, perhaps the matting, that no individual report would ever have surfaced.

The system also captures near misses, with a significant amount of qualitative data about occasions when something did not go wrong but easily could have. That is the part with the most preventive value, and it is the part a static log tends to lose entirely.

You can see more of the platforms we have built and read about how we approach data-heavy products.

How should a non-technical leader choose a development partner?

Kath’s summary is four words: look widely, interview deeply.

The process took a while, and she is candid that a previous system had been built by someone else and turned out not to be the right long-term choice. So the ABC ran a broad tender and spoke to a number of agencies rather than shortlisting quickly.

Her substantive advice concerns who sits on the review panel. She describes herself as not technical, and she deliberately paired herself with a colleague, Nick Cooper, who is. Her reasoning is that a purely technical panel loses the human interface, the perspective of the people who will use the thing without understanding how it works. Both viewpoints catch different failures, and a panel with only one of them will pick the wrong partner in a way nobody notices until much later.

Rob’s addition is that a fractional CTO can supply the technical half of that pairing when a client does not have a Nick Cooper on the team, acting as an independent translator between the client and the build. Nick Sales explains how that role works in a separate episode.

What can a non-technical client contribute to product design?

The most-used feature, in this case.

In the old database, recording an injury meant typing something like left ankle twisted into a text field. Kath’s contribution to the new system was an interactive human body form, so that the person reporting selects the location directly. She is straightforward that this was her main input to the whole process, and equally straightforward that it is not a technical idea. It is a usability idea, and it turned out to be core to why the tool feels intuitive.

This is worth dwelling on, because it inverts the usual assumption about who contributes what. The technical team solved the technical problems. The person who had never built software identified the interaction that would decide whether staff actually completed reports under time pressure.

Kath also mentions something that only emerges after launch: some improvements are invisible until real users are in the system. The facility-area reporting refinement came out of live use rather than out of the specification.

How does better incident data help with insurance and regulation?

Mostly by turning a scramble into a process.

Some of the requirement is simply legal. Climbing walls must document accidents, and workplace incidents fall under RIDDOR reporting. The previous reality was a mixture of online forms, printed paper and scanning, which Kath describes as a bit of a mess. In the new system, the injured party and the reporting party can both sign within the tool, supporting paperwork and photographs upload alongside, and everything for a given incident sits together.

She is careful not to overclaim on insurance, since the system is new enough that insurers have not yet come asking. Her expectation is that when they do, the process will be considerably smoother, and that the real present-day benefit is peace of mind: knowing the paperwork, signatures and photographs are already in place means an enquiry is procedural rather than stressful.

There is also a regulatory strategy behind it. The industry has self-regulated for years, and the intention is to stay far enough ahead that external regulation is unnecessary. The ABC works with environmental health teams, government departments and local authorities, and this is precisely the kind of data they might ask for.

Why does inclusive design matter in products and brands?

Because defaults carry a message whether or not anyone intended one.

During the design process, a deliberate decision was made not to depict climbers as rippling, half-naked bodies on a wall. Kath’s point is that sport has a persistent default towards the muscular white male, and it operates even at the smallest scale. If an illustration includes a tiny figure purely to convey the size of a wall, that figure should still not look like a shop mannequin.

This connects to a larger strand of the ABC’s work. Inclusion is part of the mission, from grassroots participation through to board-level representation. A recent event called Aim to Change focused on disability inclusion, including sessions on climbing for visually impaired people and on British Sign Language for climbing, which one of Kath’s team uses.

The forthcoming national ranking system has a similar logic. Allowing anyone competing anywhere in the UK to submit results and see a national position makes competition more meaningful for people in thinly populated categories, who might otherwise be one of very few entrants locally. Kath’s comparison is the stickiness of Strava or parkrun.

For context on scale: Sport England’s Active Lives data puts England at approaching a million regular climbers a year, with regular meaning a couple of times a week. Toby Roberts also took gold in Paris, and the ABC works closely with the British Mountaineering Council and GB Climbing on the elite side.

About the guest

Kath Hipwell is CEO of the Association of British Climbing Walls, the trade association representing around 250 UK climbing walls and setting the national safety standards for the sector. She spent her earlier career in brand strategy at large advertising agencies and within the BBC, working on brands including The Times and the Sunday Times, before founding her own strategy practice. She leads on inclusion as part of the ABC’s mission.

About the host

Rob Woodhead is a co-founder of Old St Labs, a London-based software agency building web and mobile products for startups and innovators. Old St Labs designed and built the ABC’s incident reporting platform, and Kath discusses that project openly during the episode.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Association of British Climbing Walls?

The ABC is a UK trade association representing around 250 climbing walls. It sets the national safety standards covering professionalism, facility structure, staff operation and safeguarding, and runs an accreditation scheme giving walls a formal mark of quality.

Why is near-miss reporting important?

Near misses describe incidents that were narrowly avoided, which makes them a richer source of preventive insight than accidents alone. Capturing them means an organisation can learn from failures that did not cause injury, rather than waiting until one does.

What makes incident reporting software useful?

Live data rather than static records. Useful systems show what is happening day to day, benchmark a facility against its industry, map where incidents occur physically, and hold signatures and supporting paperwork in one place for legal and insurance purposes.

How do you choose a software development agency if you are not technical?

Look widely and interview deeply, and include both a technical and a non-technical person on the review panel. Kath Hipwell’s experience is that each perspective catches problems the other misses, and a purely technical panel can overlook usability entirely.

How many people climb in the UK?

Sport England’s Active Lives data indicates England is approaching a million regular climbers a year, with regular defined as climbing a couple of times a week.

‍