WATCHING THE WORLD ZERO RISK

With Roger Vielvoye from London While North Sea operators are trying to cultivate a zero risk employee in their bid to improve safety, lurking within every offshore worker is a dice throwing, risk taking, gambling man. That's the view of John Adams, a reader in geography at University College, London. He is the author of several books on risk taking who is working on a U.K. government funded study of risk and rationality.

April 8, 1991

3 min read

While North Sea operators are trying to cultivate a zero risk employee in their bid to improve safety, lurking within every offshore worker is a dice throwing, risk taking, gambling man.

That's the view of John Adams, a reader in geography at University College, London. He is the author of several books on risk taking who is working on a U.K. government funded study of risk and rationality.

He believes while corporations have set their face against personal risk and work toward elimination of accidents, individuals are ambivalent about risk. No one wants an accident, he says, but people willingly take risks.

THE VIRTUES OF RISK

Popular culture glorifies risk. The idols of sports pages and financial pages are risk takers. Language is littered with aphorisms extolling the virtues of risk.

But Adams points out that the propensity to take risks probably is rooted in something even deeper than culture. Psychologists speak of a physiological need to stimulate the flow of adrenaline Looking specifically at the North Sea, Adams says no amount of money can make North Sea oil extraction totally safe. And with more money spent on safety and environmental safeguards, less reserves will be profitable to exploit. Producing oil, as with almost every other activity in life, involves striking a balance between risks and benefits, a problem not covered by the Cullen report into the Piper Alpha platform disaster.

The idea that supervision of safety can be handed over to an institutional zero risk man who will strive diligently to eliminate all accidents is unrealistic and undesirable, Adams says.

In practice, judgment about the safety of oil exploration and production will be made in the context of judgments about profits, national security, and environmental protection. All of those judgments will be made in the face of enormous uncertainty.

Adams was given a platform for his views by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, one of the leaders in moves among oil companies to eliminate operational risks.

An article by Adams on prudence and the gambler appeared in Shell World magazine. The magazine also contains a lengthy interview with Ric Charlton, with Shell International Petroleum Mij.'s exploration and production operations and liaison division, giving the corporate view of safety post-Cullen.

SHELL'S REACTION

Adams' article produced an instant reaction from Shell International Petroleum's head of health safety and the environment, Koos Visser, who says Adams is talking about personal-not group-motivation. Organizational culture, training, and concern for others can instill the self-discipline required to reject risk at work, Visser says.

He also says whatever the truth of Adams' thesis, it can never be the basis of industrial safety policies. Companies are required by the authorities, by society, and by the persons who work in their operations to make every effort to be safe.

Companies cannot decide on some acceptable level of accidents and count a small number of deaths as unimportant. The aim of avoiding all accidents is far from being a public relation puff. It is the only responsible policy.

Turning gambling man into zero risk man is just one of the challenges that has to be overcome along the way.