As the energy transition advances, safety in the oil and gas industry has evolved from the era of human error to the era of resilience. The resilience-based approach to safety was the focus of a panel of experts at the 2025 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Houston.
“Resilience,” said Camille Peres, the president of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, “is process oriented and outcome oriented.”
Peres shared the stage with moderator Abdelsalam Yasseen, health, safety, and environment (HSE) leader at Baker Hughes; Lamberto Nonno, global HSE director at Baker Hughes; Tom Knode, principal consultant at vPSI Group; and Josué França, professor of system safety and risk management at KTH in Sweden.
Resilience, the panel said, needs to be baked into an organization.
“If you do it from the beginning, … the money you’re going to save on the reduced number of incidents, the safety, is astronomical,” Peres said. “But you’ve got to get in at the beginning.”
Procedures
Creating proper procedures is important for creating a resilient organization. This requires looking at the work not as it was designed to be done, but as it is actually performed—what the panel called “normal work.”
“The challenge is learning from normal work,” Knode said. “It’s not only the quantitative and qualitative risk assessments you do. The problem with those, there’s biases in them. It’s having the people who have to do the work tell you, ‘You guys never see it, but this happens all the time. It’s just, we’re so lucky that nothing bad has happened.’”
A resilient system, Peres said, is going to be able to use that information in a systematic way, adding that it’s important to gather the data “in a culture where they’re not going to get in trouble. … It’s just such a routine matter of doing business, doing work, that, ‘Oh, OK, well, why is this happening? What’s the problem? Is there something broken here? Are we not communicating well?’ And then it’s fixed very quickly. It’s fixed very easily. And everybody moves on. And, so, that’s a resilient process that’s going to prevent something from happening so you’re not retrospectively having to address this after an incident.”
Culture
Having a strong safety culture is necessary for shaping these resilient processes and procedures.
“I think that’s the way procedures can be leveraged as not only a tool for doing the work itself but a tool for identifying where problems might be that can be addressed very easily and quickly where nobody is having to call anybody out or have this be part of some sort of audit system or something that would be considered punitive,” Peres said.
But maintaining a safety culture comes with its own challenges.
“The challenge with the concept of safety culture, safety climate, is that it’s like human factors,” Knode said. “We know it exists, we know it’s out there; but how do you actually measure it?”
Measuring safety culture, Knode said, is a matter of perspective. “When you survey your employees for safety culture, you’re getting their perspective of how you run your business. But their perspective is based on their experiences,” he said. He pointed out that conducting safety culture surveys “in parts of the world where they don’t challenge leadership, you’ll get five out of five. Whereas, if you run it in areas where they do challenge leadership, you’ll get ones and twos.”
While safety culture is difficult to measure—“It’s not an absolute number,” Knode said—it is recognizable. “You can see it when you walk around. When you talk to people, you’ll find out. … Do people think about managing risks? And, if they’re not, you cannot have a resilient organization.”
This culture of communication in risk management is vital. “If they’re not managing risks or safety, then the resilience is by luck. … An unplanned event occurs, and either you’re lucky or you aren’t. You haven’t built resilience in the system, and a culture of safety, a culture of resilience, means the organization expects that to be built into the way you do your work.”
Human decision-making, however, will always be a factor and is integral in the consideration of resilient systems.
“For me, resilience is about exercising human judgment also sometimes,” Nonno said. “So how do we train people to get better at this in practice? I’m thinking gamification, maybe role-playing games, you know, things like that, virtual reality.”
França pointed out that resilience comes from the connection between the workers and the systems in which they work. “It’s a balance between human decision and the system,” França said. “The problem is not human. The problem is not the system. The problem is both. And the solution (is) as well.”
