According to Stewart Behie, manager of safety and process risk at Occidental Oil and Gas Corp., decision making is ubiquitous throughout industry, but the outcome of many of those decisions is not necessarily critical to the process by which the decisions are made.
"We're all decision makers," Behie said. "We make decisions every day. But when the ultimate decision is a complex or very difficult situation, the process by which we make those decisions is critically important."
Discussing risk-based decision management and how to improve the outcome of critical technical decisions, Behie noted when industry leaders and managers face challenging technical decisions, they face a dilemma.
"We have two possible outcomes," he said at the Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas Summit held recently in Houston. "We can make the decision that results in a good outcome and be a hero, or if our decisions result in a significantly negative outcome, we'll be the goat. Everyone wants to be a hero."
Many drivers and pressures, including financial, scheduling, and insufficient or conflicting data issues, compound decision making in "the very complex world of projects and operations management," he said. "We have to visualize how we are going to cure all those factors and make them balance in our decisions."
Behie challenged listeners to improve their ability to internalize lessons learned from incidents.
"We have to improve our ability to internalize learning from incidents. We haven't done a very good job of that, historically," he said. "We don't learn from incidents because we're looking at the wrong things.
"We have to improve our ability of learning from past incidents, because in an incident investigation and cost analysis, we focus on what happened. And in my view, we have to focus on what went wrong. We have to focus on the decisions. The answer to what went wrong lies in deficiencies and poor decisions."
Looking through the eyes of risk
Among the functions of risk discipline, Behie said, is to instill an "independent risk conscience" in an organization.
"Good risk discipline would have a voice on the executive committee and management team, working with asset integrity folks," he said, adding that risk discipline requires personnel to be trained "in risk program elements throughout the business unit management structure."
"Management needs the benefit of good risk assessment when they make decisions," Behie said. "We need to ensure that happens."
Risk discipline also requires management signoff on critical decisions after validation, Behie said.
It is incumbent upon leaders to train technical decision makers in the art of risk-based decision making and formally empower the risk team with the authority to validate critical decisions, giving visibility and credibility to decision buckets, Behie added.
He also urged leaders to elevate the importance of risk discipline and function and to "conduct robust risk assessment as the norm, each and every time," encouraging the adoption of a risk assessment paradigm.
"Learn to look through the eyes of risk," he said. "See one's function and role in the risk paradigm."
Summarizing, Behie said "robust risk assessment" is imperative, because it "provides critical input to the decision making process and important context on which to base critical decisions."
"It defines requirements to frame decisions and defines the approval level to proceed," he said.
Risk assessment also helps decision makers avoid moving into the "zone of uncertainty and flying blind."
Ultimately, he concluded, it improves decision makers' chances of "being a hero."
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