A joint ambition: No more safety catastrophes; No more fatalities

It is wonderful to be with you in India.

 

This is such a special country.

 

It hits you the moment you arrive – the sheer energy, vitality and intensity of life.

 

It’s everywhere. In every city. In every street. In your food, your music, your movies. Especially your movies.

 

I wanted to start by telling a story that comes from one of them – a modern Bollywood classic that some of you may have seen.

 

Three Idiots?

 

Every night, a watchman would patrol the village, calling out, ‘All is well! All is well!’

 

The villagers slept soundly, believing they were safe.

 

But what they didn’t know was the watchman was blind.

 

He couldn’t see any danger, because he couldn’t see anything at all, yet his voice alone made people feel secure.

 

They placed their trust in him, unquestioningly.

 

But imagine what would happen if a real threat appeared one night – a fire, a thief, or an accident.

 

The watchman wouldn’t see it coming, and the villagers, lulled into a false sense of security, would be caught completely off guard.

 

In the energy industry, we too have watchmen. We have processes, checks, and protocols that assure us ‘All is well.’

 

But just like that village, we must realise that while these are reassuring – and definitely serve a purpose…

 

…they may not always protect us as much as we think.

 

 

Comfort and complacency

In fact, we can take false comfort from those things…

 

… becoming swaddled under layer upon layer of safety processes, like a security blanket.

 

Over the last 35 years, I’ve worked in the field and with many teams on the frontline. As have many of you.

 

I know – you know – that a complex and lengthy procedure may not prevent an excavator from contacting an overhead powerline in the way a simple toolbox talk would.

 

More safety rules don’t necessarily make us safer.

 

That is the paradox.

 

And there is another paradox too.

 

That when there are prolonged periods without major catastrophic incidents…

 

…again, we can take comfort – false comfort…

 

…and actually become less safe.

 

All of us know that countless hours spent in the office reviewing metrics and dashboards – and watching trends improving – can fool us into the notion that everything is fine…

 

…only for an incident to happen shortly after.

 

I believe that when leaders take too much comfort from safety processes and safety records…

 

… we can become desensitised to danger. We can drift.

 

Because, when nothing really bad has happened for some time…

 

…when our processes have been working just fine…

 

…when those things we’ve been concerned about haven’t turned out to be a problem…

 

…or at least they haven’t so far…

 

…we can start to normalise risk…

 

…and complacency can kick in.

 

[pause]

 

Now, no one drifts deliberately. Complacency is never a choice.

 

It is a function of a stable system – usually creeping into organisations when everyone’s assuring themselves, ‘All is well’.

 

Which of course makes it very hard to spot.

 

 

A deadly combination

The major jeopardy arises when complacency …

 

…coincides with economic or political pressure – or both.

 

There might be pressure to cut costs…

 

…which can lead to underinvestment in maintenance and increases in staff turnover.

 

There might be pressure to beat rivals…

 

…which can influence design, processes, the pace of production.

 

There might be pressure to realise big ambitions…

 

…which can trigger all kinds of biases…

 

…optimism bias, confirmation bias, sunk cost bias…

 

…where leaders doggedly pursue mission at the expense of safety.

 

I think of what such pressures have done to great companies, great organisations.

 

This isn’t unique to energy.

 

Think aviation – Boeing’s rivalry with Airbus…its development of the 737 Max…the automated MCAS system.

 

Or aerospace – and NASA’s fixation on its Challenger mission in 1986…

 

…“the shuttle must launch”…

 

…“the O-Rings will be fine”…

 

…“take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat”.

 

Comfort from past success made senior leaders blind to risks…

 

…and desperation for future success made some deaf to legitimate warnings.

 

It was – it is – a deadly combination.

 

The Challenger Shuttle crashed, killing all 7 crew. Then the Columbia crashed in 2003, killing 7 more.

 

The 737 Max crashed in 2018 and then again in 2019, killing 346 passengers and crew.

 

The question therefore is how to root out complacency…

 

…mitigate pressures…

 

…override biases…

 

…and appreciate the risks that can come from being safe?

 

There are two things. 

 

 

Leadership

Without a doubt, the first is leadership.  

 

A whisper at the top is a shout at the bottom…

 

…and what we as leaders say from our privileged position can infuse entire companies.

 

I looked after bp’s Global Operations in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon in 2010.

 

Of course, many of the technical problems that caused the disaster occurred deep under the ocean…

 

…but many of the risks emanated from the top of the company. Our company.

 

Human judgements, engineering design, operational implementation, and the interactions between teams…¹

 

…all these failures led to the deaths of 11 people and environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico.

 

[pause]

 

When I look hard at our own failings…

 

…and when I look at all big organisations…

 

…I believe that part of the problem is that these decisions are often made a long way from what’s happening on the ground…

 

…or under the sea, or up in the air, as the case may be.

 

In corporate environments, stock prices, balance sheets and news headlines give very real, concrete, immediate feedback to those in charge.

 

The consequences of failing financially are more tangible, more urgent, easier to visualise than far-away hypotheticals.

 

There is temporal distance from recent disaster, in an ever-safer climate…

 

…and there is physical distance from operations – particularly for leaders without direct experience themselves.

 

It can be all too easy to imagine everything will be fine. Everything will go according to plan.

 

So we have a duty to bring reality closer. To make leaders see what could happen – what has happened.

 

Piper Alpha. Exxon Valdez. Deepwater Horizon.

 

And here, in this amazing country of yours.

 

Bhopal. Mumbai High North. The Amudan Chemicals factory explosion, just a few months ago.

 

Leaders must remember – must always remember – the people who lost their lives.

 

Not just in the aftermath, or on the anniversaries, but every day.

 

For me, it is just as important that the Boardroom understands the risks as the control room…

 

…and that leaders take off their management hats and put on their engineering hats.

 

That will create the conditions for a truly interdependent safety culture.

 

 

Culture

And this takes me to my second point.

 

We need a culture in which everyone feels safe to speak up, call out dangers and sound the warning when all is not well.

 

We need to invite concerns and welcome challenges, because psychological safety leads to process safety.

 

We need to allow communication to flow freely upwards, as well as down.

 

We need to applaud strength of character; encourage devil’s advocates.

 

We need to respond strongly to weak signals.

 

And we need to respect independent checks and balances.

 

I was never convinced by the strapline ‘safety first’.

 

It suggests safety is done at the beginning and then you move on to the next thing.

 

It invites complacency.

 

That is why safety shouldn’t just be made a priority. Priorities can change – they do change.

 

Safety must be a value.

 

A culture.

 

Something that endures and is impervious to external pressures. 

 

 

Conclusion

Of course, we also have to be honest: we will never totally eliminate risk.

 

We’re human – that’s both a blessing and a curse.

 

Human ingenuity is what enables 10 million people every single day to fly at hundreds of kilometres an hour, in what is essentially a tin can.

 

It allows us to drill several kilometres below the seafloor, to extract the oil and gas that help power our lives.

 

It got us to the Moon and back and will get us there again.

 

But human fallibility means there have been errors, oversights.

 

Yet it is our shared humanity…

 

…our recognition of who we are here to serve and protect…

 

…which can take all of us to an even greater place on safety…

 

…and realise a joint ambition:

 

No more process safety catastrophes.

 

No more fatalities.

 

So, let us honour the people, on the frontline, who have, tragically, lost their lives.  

 

Let us look out for the biases, which we are all prone to under pressure.

Let us listen hard to our people – hearing their whispers as shouts.

 

Let us never forget our responsibility to each other.

 

Finally, let us recommit to – and extend – that old motto…

 

…not just ‘safety first’ but ‘safety first; safety always’.

 

Thank you. 

¹ https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/news-and-insights/press-releases/bp-releases-report-on-causes-of-gulf-of-mexico-tragedy.html