Supporting Good Safety Decision Making

Safety within an organisation is heavily influenced by decisions made at executive Board level and by senior managers of the divisions in the case of large multilevel organisations ('leaders'). Lack of direction and oversight from leaders has been cited as a major contributory factor by investigations into some of the largest incidents that have occurred in the energy industry. However, leaders do not act in a vacuum; they are responding to the information they are provided with by managers and their understanding of that information, as they balance the demands placed on them by competing business drivers such as: optimisation of income and expenditure to maximise profit; and maintaining licence to operate and the confidence of all stakeholders.