Thursday, March 22, 2012

Building a “New Normal”

Historically, our industry has been driven by a series of inflection points tore-examine best practices, technologies, or philosophies on how we conduct our business. The most notable of these have often been associated with tragedies such as the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea and, most recently, the Macondo disaster in the US Gulf of Mexico. Piper Alpha led to a wide-scale focus on health, safety, and the environment (HSE), fundamentally changing the way companies viewed safety, and led to orders of magnitude improvement in HSE practices. While the full impact of Macondo is only now being fully understood, it is clear that we will see a similar effect on the way we handle quality, competency, safety critical systems, and contingency planning.


In both of the incidents, external pressure precipitated the cultural or technical shift to a new operating norm, while the capabilities and technology for bridging the gap were available. Until we consider risk management and operational sustainability as business drivers and an equal part of our mission, we will never make the paradigm shift from a reactive to a proactive business model.


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