Process Safety Leadership is Like Swimming — You Can’t Do It By Reading About It

Major accidents kill people, ruin lives, damage the environment and destroy businesses. From Piper Alpha to Grenfell Tower, failure of leadership has been a significant causal factor in many major accidents across major hazard sectors, including nuclear, aviation, marine transport, rail, high rise residential buildings as well as chemicals & refining and oil & gas.

As a former senior leader in one of the UK’s largest energy businesses, with responsibilities for managing and assuring process safety across operations in onshore and offshore oil & gas, bulk storage of hydrocarbons and both conventional and nuclear power generation, I am all too familiar with seeing first-hand how good — and poor — leadership can profoundly impact process safety.

In 2010, industry, unions and regulators jointly developed the eight Process Safety Leadership Principles (PSLPs) that emerged from the 2005 Buncefield incident. These have been widely adopted across onshore and offshore major hazard industries.

A recent report from the COMAH Strategic Forum, of which I am very proud to be the Chairman, sets out the key findings from the preliminary inspections against process safety leadership principles conducted by the HSE.

Whilst there are some good examples of effective leadership, there is still much work to be done; only one third of inspected businesses have been rated as having good or excellent process safety leadership.

There are a number of key recurring issues:

• The essential need for leaders to communicate effectively about process safety across the entire organisation.
• The need for senior leaders, regardless of their role or responsibilities, to demonstrate an appropriate level of process safety competency.
• The importance of having an effective set of process safety performance indicators that senior leaders understand and can challenge to continuously improve process safety performance.

Frankly, these should not come as a surprise to any management team; the only real surprise is that, nearly 20 years after Texas City and Buncefield, and 35 years after Piper Alpha, we are still banging the same drum.

We at Empirisys are very proud to have been selected by @Step Change in Safety to support them in their forthcoming offshore industry survey of process safety leadership against the 8 PSLPs, which has been endorsed by the HSE and OEUK.

We strongly encourage you to take part in this survey; we intend to feed the results back at Positively Influencing Safety so we need as many participants as possible.

#Playyourpart

Author- Gus Carroll (CEO of Empirisys)

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