“Safety is our number one priority”, so says leadership. Interestingly, this was also mentioned by the CEO at BP prior to the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo disaster.
I just summarised a 2016 paper which analysed the “CEO-speak” of BP leaders prior to the disaster. Summary posted in a week or two.
They found that:
· 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.
Further to the “number one priority” rhetoric, the word ‘safety’ is used only twice in the entire 2,323-word AGM speech that was immediately prior to the accident. The text is rather dominated by financial and organisational efficiency.
They also found that BP’s view of culture presumed 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.
The attached image highlights the frequency of keywords mentioned during the AGM prior to the accident – emphasising the drive for cost, efficiency, reserves, growth etc, but not necessarily safety.
Ref: Amernic, J., & Craig, R. (2017). CEO speeches and safety culture: British Petroleum before the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Critical perspectives on accounting, 47, 61-80.
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2016.11.004
SafetyInsights.org 
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