The Implementation of Safety-II: Learning from Normal Work in Practice

Abstract The oil and gas industry has for decades learned about safety from the analysis of failure, adverse events, incidents, and accidents. This approach is called "safety-I". Safety-I has helped the industry reach a plateau of general high levels safety, measured as the absence of incidents, compared to other industries, but there is still room for further and continuous improvements. Researchers in human factors and safety have suggested that safety critical industries, in the future, should not only learn from failure, but also from the normal everyday successful work. This approach is called "safety-II" (Hollnagel et al. 2015), and, in a report from The International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (2022), "learning from normal work". The paper describes the practical implementation and roll-out of safety-II and learning from normal work on board operating drilling rigs. The learning from normal work project covers 3 phases: Phase 1: The onboard studies of positive practice, i.e., ethnographic observations of normal daily work and conversations with crew members, e.g., on the drill floor. Phase 2: The development and prototype testing of learning material based on the onboard observations and training of onboard facilitators in the learning team format. Phase 3: The final validation of the learning from normal work concept in a ramp-up case study on a rig starting a new drilling campaign. More than 160 examples of positive practice from 5 different rigs (2 drillships, 2 jackups and 1 semisubmersibles) were collected in the first phase of the learning from normal work project. The examples illustrate how crews add safety to the process by, e.g., the way they communicate and interact, the way they use technology or the way they plan and discuss their work. The positive examples were filtered and used to generate learning material in the form of learning cards for interactive discussions of safety in learning teams and positive examples to be used in safety meetings and presentations for inspiration as an alternative to failure and incident cases. One important conclusion from the learning from normal work project is that the crews contribute to the safety of the process through their behavior and small actions in the daily routine work. Thereby, they put many small "safety nets" in place in the system making it resilient and strong. Looking at positive practice and positive events is new when discussing safety. It changes the narrative and the focus of the discussion from "what to avoid" to "what to do more" and "what to develop and support". This philosophy is based on positive reinforcement as a motivating and driving factor.