>>Steve Macaulay: The BP oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico has evoked a lot of
emotion and quite a few lessons, both for society and for business generally. Now to
explore both of these issues and many more interrelated issues, we have got two people
who come from different perspectives; there is David Grayson and David Denyer.
Now let’s start off with you, David Grayson; you come at it from a responsibility perspective,
of how business fits into society – what have you been observing?
>>David Grayson: Well, I think this BP crisis will finally banish the idea that how a company
manages its environmental and social impacts is marginal and it is nothing really to do
with business. Because I think what this case has –very powerfully– demonstrated is
the costs of ignoring or not really managing very professionally your environmental and
social impacts.
I think for BP it has been complicated because, rightly or wrongly, the world thought that
they had committed themselves to higher standards with Beyond Petroleum and somehow then it
doesn’t seem as if they have really been able to live up to those higher standards
of environmental and social performance.
>>Steve Macaulay: Let’s pick this up, David Denyer; BP, how it has managed the crisis
that it has experienced, how it got to where it is today. Now you have been looking at
this; what can we learn from what you have seen?
>>David Denyer: A lot of organisations that have major crises, major disasters, major
events, the typical response is that there is an investigation from an outside body,
it comes up with a set of recommendations, that are the forty or fifty things that that
organisation needs to change and maybe that applies to other parts of the industry as
well. And typically those things aren’t implemented across the board, otherwise BP
may never have had this event after its previous events, with things like Texas City and, indeed,
on the Deepwater Horizon itself.
Rather than more policies, more procedures, more regulation, I think this is a real opportunity
for BP to fundamentally rethink how it is designing itself, how it is operating for
high reliability and to ensure safety and the avoidance of major accidents in the future.
>>Steve Macaulay: So David, are there lessons that business generally need to learn from
this, rather than just BP?
>>David Denyer: Yes, definitely. A lot of research has shown that the fundamental difference
between organisations that fail to have serious untoward incidents – serious incidents – is
to do with the organisational culture. It is not because they have got the best technologies;
it is not that they are regulated in a certain way. It is because safety and reliability
is fundamentally embedded into the organisational culture. They are able to anticipate these
events, they are able to pick up on some of the weak signals in the system and they are
able to make sense and therefore able to act to prevent these issues from escalating.
All of these issues start off as small, minor events, but then cascade into major issues.
And what will unfold, I am sure, with this investigation is the whole range of issues
that have occurred that have led to this event. Only by fundamentally changing the organisational
culture will those things be able to be picked up and dealt with appropriately.
>>Steve Macaulay: David Grayson, what do you think about the lessons we can learn?
>>David Grayson: I think this is critically important, because deep water drilling is
not going to stop. Most of the new oil reserves that are being discovered around the world
are in deep water conditions – which is real frontier technology. So it is very important
that we don’t just put all the blame on BP and imagine that it couldn’t possibly
happen to any of these other major oil companies, because it is something which could have happened
probably to any one of them given the wrong sets of circumstances developing.
So, in addition to making sure that we learn what happened, I think that what you need
to have – and whether it is BP able to take the lead on this, or whether somebody else
has to do it – you need to have an industry initiative, like you had in the chemical industry
after Bhopal with their responsible care initiative. You need to have the oil industry working
out what is best practice standards which they are going to commit to adhere to around
the world, whether it is off Libya or whether it is off Indonesia or anywhere else in the
world. Because otherwise there is a danger that these kind of things might happen again
in a part of the world where there is not quite such easy access for the world’s media
to be able to see what is happening.
So I think if we are really going to get the lessons from this, it is not just more regulation,
it is also collective self regulation by the industry.
>>Steve Macaulay: Gentlemen, thank you very much. What we are going to do is to offer
you the opportunity to contribute to this; if you go to the Debate section on the Cranfield
Knowledge Interchange, you will have an opportunity to find out more of what we have said here
and for you to contribute, too. Thank you.