Improving Major Risk Management
Associated with these flaws is the failure of companies to look at themselves very closely from a management perspective. They almost never examine themselves and their constituencies. That is to say, they do not examine the wider context or take a systemic approach. Yet any investigation of the April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will come away with an incomplete causal picture if it fails to consider the
Technical problems are caused by people, organisations and organisational systems operating together.
behaviour of the old Minerals Management Service, Transocean or Halliburton. An investigation would also be incomplete if it did not look at managerial issues in units immediately surrounding the rig, including the British Petroleum (BP) headquarters in Houston and London.4
Oil & Gas Upstream H2
In addition, the oil and gas industry is particularly good at claiming it cannot use processes and standards drawn from other industries because ‘we’re too different from them’. Yet as we previously saw, organisations in very different industries are similar to one another in a variety of ways.
Finally, many organisations, including some in the oil and gas industry, focus on past success as a substitute for sound engineering principles. BP did this very thing just prior to both its Texas City refinery accident and the more recent Gulf spill.5
Approaches to Improving Risk Management in Oil and Gas
While there are probably many technical changes that would improve risk management, this author is not competent to speak about them. Focusing on management, a number of approaches might be considered. Firstly, the oil companies may want to examine the better major accident reports, whether from their own or another industry. One can select significant flaws and turn these into best practices.
Outside the oil industry, the NASA investigation of the Columbia space shuttle accident, which happened in 2003, is often mentioned as the quintessential accident investigation. While the report devotes one chapter to the technical failures involved, it devotes three chapters (out of 11) to cultural, decision-making and organisational failures that ultimately led to the accident. One can distil those chapters and readily come up with a list of organisational processes deserving attention in the oil and gas industry.
The Investigation Board turned to contemporary organisation theory on accidents and risk to help it understand how to develop a more thorough understanding of accident causes and risk. Specifically, they turned to high reliability, normal accident and organisation theory.6
The Board found that neither high reliability nor normal accident theory were entirely appropriate for understanding this accident, but insights from each figured prominently in its deliberations. From the smorgasbord of conceptual ideas in the literature,7,8 the following.
the Board selected EXPLORATION & PRODUCTION – VOLUME 9 ISSUE 1
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