I want to start by telling you a story about a colleague working in our industry.
This technician—an experienced, competent person—inexplicably left a valve open, leading to a large spill.
Except it wasn’t inexplicable because the technician hadn’t slept all night due to the noise on the facility.
Studies suggest that being awake for 24 hours is like having a blood alcohol level that would prevent you from driving in some countries.
He’d effectively been asleep at the hand wheel.
While everything had been done to make sure that piece of equipment worked well, very little had been done to ensure he was well enough to work.
I have a confession here.
For most of my career—including eight of those as BP’s head of global operations—“health” was not a big priority for me.
Even when I became SVP for HSE and Carbon in 2018, I still considered myself a safety man.
For me, health—physical and mental—was secondary.
But the longer I’ve been in the job, the more I’ve seen it—that, when something has gone wrong, then, usually, somewhere along that chain, there’s been an exhausted technician, a distracted supervisor, a stressed manager.
I’m an engineer, and yet I’d missed the vital equation here.
It’s not health and safety; health is safety.
When our people become healthier, we are all safer.
Yet in industry today, health is often downgraded, downplayed, dismissed.
Many of us, in many sectors, have been asleep here too.
And it’s time we all woke up, woke up to the importance of wellbeing.
Our industry has been on a journey these past few years.
Things have improved.
But we’ve got to move faster, travel further, be much bolder.
And that is what I want to talk about today.