CEO speeches and safety culture: British Petroleum before the Deepwater Horizon disaster

This paper explored the relationship between CEO leadership language and safety at BP prior to the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion. Their main lenses are those of ideology and metaphor (via ‘CEO-speak’).

This paper is really detailed and dense, so I can’t do it justice.

Key data was the then CEO Tony Hayward’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) speech prior to the accident, and 18 other speeches from Heyward prior to the accident.

Note. This paper focuses on ‘safety culture’. Many like this concept, others struggle, but whatever. The paper is what it is.

Providing background:

• A focus on a unitary, organisation-wide ‘safety culture’ at BP, as promoted by leaders, was “rendered problematic” due to BP having numerous groups in heterogeneous work, with widely different safety risks, across already-existing legacy cultures from the broader societies and groups in which those people operate.
• Hayward’s replacement after the accident acknowledged that BP’s “safety culture” needed a shakeup. The Baker report (one group investigating the accident), for instance, mentioned safety culture 387 times.
• CEO-speak is “potentially a central formative element in developing a safety culture”, and CEO-speak can be conceptualised as anthropological because of “its importance in propagating and enabling ‘shared beliefs and values’ (an ideology) relating to safety” (p6).
• This view is said to be consistent with Schein’s view that “Culture is created by shared experience, but it is the leader who initiates this process by imposing his or her beliefs, values, and assumptions” (p6).

Results

·????????Overall, by analysing the CEO-speak, the authors identified that “the language used contributed rhetorically to an ideology of economic efficiency and cost control, in a manner that was inconsistent with an enduring safety culture”.

·????????Specifically, the CEO speeches emphasised particular accounting-related aspects in the narrative, like the tension between economic efficiency (including cost control) with a desire for a strong safety culture

·????????Moreover, while Hayward claimed that his “number one priority’ was safety, perversely ‘safety’ is hardly mentioned at all, while costcutting, financial matters, and organizational efficiency dominate”

·????????Hence, the CEO-speak tokenistically mentioned safety while focusing primarily on cost cutting, financial matters and organisational efficiency

For specific findings, the word ‘safety’ appeared only 17 times in Hayward’s 18 prior speeches to the 2010 AGM speech.

The authors state that the incidence of the word ‘safety’ appears to be low, considering “BP’s longstanding poor safety culture history”. Thus, they found little evidence for the notion that “the tone at the top was engaged actively in a normative discourse to promote a safety culture”.

When Hayward mentioned safety, it was coupled with:

·????????Referring to safety in a corporate project

·????????Safety of oil supplies

·????????And the title of a BP report

The word ‘culture’ appeared just four times and each “use is bereft of any link to safety”. The CEO prior to Hayward mentioned safety just 56 times, and ‘safe’ only 15 times across 125 publicly available speeches.

They also found use of language that seemed to separate safety, people and performance, such that “apparently regards safety as a separate, perhaps compartmentalised construct” – which is inconsistent with the view that safety culture is an integral constituent of an organisation’s culture.

While building core capabilities of people was mentioned, it was causally linked with safe and reliable operations, the focus on efficiency, and hence, “safety is made rhetorically subservient to” improved operational performance.

“Safety remains our number one priority” was also mentioned. However, this was measured almost solely by output measures, particularly financial. Of 24 performance measures mentioned in Hayward’s speech, just one involved safety (recordable injuries…meh). This is said to “sit oddly with the foundation concepts of safety culture”.

Further to the “number one priority” rhetoric, the word ‘safety’ is used only twice in the entire 2,323-word AGM speech. The text is rather dominated by financial and organisational efficiency.

Near the end of the speech, the first mention of the OMS (operating management system) is mentioned to be ‘fully implemented’. Hayward also “refers casually” to establishing a new culture at BP. It is unclear what this means, nor how this ‘new culture’ differs from the previous culture(s). It also lacks an appreciation of just how monumental trying to shift cultures can be.

The one-word metaphor ‘drive’ was used multiple times, highlighting the drive for efficiency. However, the authors argue that it is unlikely BP can “simultaneously drive down costs and improve safety, especially without acknowledging the complexity of constructing a safety culture in which every one in the company would have a common focus on greater safety at reduced risk”.

This view of culture presumes a “unitary, mechanical …organizational culture of a type that is unrealistic in a large global, high-risk company”. This draws parallel to the NASA ‘faster, better, cheaper’ organisational ideology – seen to be central in the Columbia shuttle accident.

Further, Hayward’s speech doesn’t draw on a “vocabulary of safety leading’ words, e.g. words like risk, hazard, maintenance, repair, prevent or accident.

As mentioned, the AGM speech is “dominated by a financial focus”, and there is “little genuine concern for ‘people issues’”.

Discussing the findings, the authors ponder on the leadership sensemaking that occurred prior to the AGM speech. Did the leaders believe they could genuinely achieve a focused drive on cost cutting and efficiency while prioritising safe and reliable operations?

Or, was this CEO-speak – that is, was Hayward “simply telling ostensibly gullible shareholders what he thinks they want to hear?”

Or, maybe this speech is an example of “corporate jingoism: a deliberately ‘upbeat account’”.

Frequency of spoken keywords are shown below:

Link in comments.

Authors: Amernic, J., & Craig, R. (2017). Critical perspectives on accounting, 47, 61-80.