Facilitating for cultural change: lessons learned from a 12-year safety improvement programme

摘要

In this paper we will present and discuss a safety development programme conducted in the period from 2001 to 2012, involving offshore service vessels and the petroleum company that contracts them. In this period there has been a considerable reduction in serious personal injuries and collisions. We present and discuss the underlying approach of the programme and how it could have influenced the positive safety results. There are different views on the extent to which safety culture can be influenced and changed. Researchers with a functionalist perspective regard cultural change to be possible through different management interventions, whereas researchers with an interpretive perspective see culture as more of an abstraction of deeply rooted conceptualizations of meaning and world views, created and recreated by all members of an organization. Consequently, culture is regarded as a concept beyond direct control, although to a certain extent it can be influenced indirectly. The approach applied in this project had an interpretive perspective as a starting point, using group facilitation as an aid in safety improvements. Facilitators are usually neutral outsiders, and their main task is to help a group increase its effectiveness by improving its process and structure. We established an arena (Captain’s forum) where captains and personnel from the petroleum company met for two days once a year, where we facilitated open discussions on safety issues. The group facilitation approach and connected activities are presented and discussed, as well as the potential influence such an approach could have on changing aspects of the safety culture.