Process Safety Leadership and Committed Culture

Increasingly, the impact of process safety leadership and committed culture in achieving incident free operations is becoming more evident. The emphasis on management systems has driven more consistency across organizations in terms of defining expectations. However, process safety leadership and committed culture is what separates a company from achieving incident free operations when both have comparable quality of management systems and standards.

The successful pursuit of incident free operation requires companies to effectively manage their operational risk. The leadership must look at the holistic picture before making choices. The role of leadership in defining the top risks and establishing the catastrophic consequences cannot be overemphasized.

Risk is assessed by evaluating the potential for incidents along with the degree of impact they could have on an organization should they occur. That means enterprises face a wide spectrum of potential risks, ranging from high frequency/low severity risks to low frequency/high severity risks, and everything in between. The range of risks may vary between one company and another depending upon several factors, such as physical location, prevailing culture, competency and operating discipline. Given the wide range of potential risks and a limit on the resources that a company can devote to risk management, it makes sense to adopt a strategy that assigns appropriate effort to potential risks. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to mitigating the risks a company faces, and it is simply not practical to address all risks with the same level of intensity. This is where process safety leadership becomes critical in defining path forward.

 A consistent way of recognizing risks across a company is critical to ensure that risks are not classified based on individual perception. This requires a committed culture where in risks are highlighted and deviations are flagged in an open environment. Committed culture requires that leadership does not shoot the messenger for raising red flags or not passing on the bad news. Raising bad news is better than having bad incidents. The mindsets and behaviours of the leadership influence the development of a committed culture.

This paper will share experience of companies that have had success in adopting a “differentiated risk” approach. This strategy ensures that appropriate process safety leadership effort and resources are expended based on the specific risk profile. This results not only in optimal risk management for an organization, but also ensuring committed culture that applies risk thinking for daily decision making. Successful operational risk management lies in identifying, evaluating and controlling losses and differentially managing associated risks.