Patrick Thomas William Hudson

Leiden University | LEI · Institute of Psychology

This study explores the process of middle management decision-making in actual conditions within the oil and gas industry by applying multiple methods including interviews, audio task recording, and activity theory. First, eight interviews were conducted in the oil and gas industrial sector to explore how middle managers take decisions. Second, to...

Recent analyses of major incidents, such as BP’s Texas City and Macondo disasters and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, have moved from considering immediate factors and basic organizational failings to including cultural issues. Culture is, however, even more difficult to incorporate into incident investigations and analyses than are organiz...

Recent disasters in high hazard industries such as Oil and Gas Exploration (The Deepwater Horizon) and Petrochemical production (Texas City) have been found to have causes that range from direct technical failures through organizational shortcomings right up to weak regulation and inappropriate company cultures. Risk models have generally concentra...

To apportion blame, and by extension liability, for an accident it is necessary to decide causality, who caused the accident and how it was caused. The same requirements apply to the preventative management of such potential accidents, except blame is assigned post-hoc, after the event, whereas preventative management is essentially proactive and o...

An integrated model for risk in a real-time environment for the hydrocarbon industry based on the CATS model for commercial aviation safety has been further developed. The approach described in earlier papers required Bayesian Belief Nets (BBN) to be developed for each process unit separately. A much more efficient method for developing the continu...

There is a wide range of HSE tools available – some function at the broadest organizational level and some target individual activities. Many managers and supervisors simply use the tools that are familiar, missing potential opportunities for improving HSE performance. In other cases, groups may try every new tool they encounter to give the impress...

Recent analyses of major incidents, such as BP's Texas City disaster and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, have moved from considering immediate factors and basic organisational failings to considering cultural issues. Cultural issues are, however, even more difficult to incorporate into incident investigations and analyses than are organisat...

This paper will discuss the results of a study outside the petrochemical industry (Vandevis (2008), but the results may have a profound effect on the way organizations try to influence their safety climate by setting so called SMART goals. It was conducted within the electrical high voltage contracting industry in Ontario, Canada and the objective...

Patient safety is one of the greatest challenges in healthcare. In the operating room errors are frequent and often consequential. This article describes an approach to a successful implementation of a patient safety program in the operating room, focussing on latent risk factors that influence patient safety. We performed an intervention to improv...

Additional file 1: Appendix 1.LOTICS scale .

The person-centred analysis and prevention approach has long dominated proposals to improve patient safety in healthcare. In this approach, the focus is on the individual responsible for making an error. An alternative is the systems-centred approach, in which attention is paid to the organizational factors that create precursors for individual err...

Incident investigation techniques in all high-hazard industries concentrate primarily on the immediate causes, such as the technical failures and the more frequent human shortcomings that led to the incident. Issues that are identified at these superficial levels of investigation and analysis tend to be local and hard to relate to deeper underlying...

The paper first discusses the problem of non-compliance in high hazard industries, as these constitute the most frequent type of dangerous activities in terms of accident outcomes. Evidence is drawn from aviation and the petrochemical sectors. The causes of non-compliance are found to form a ‘lethal cocktail’ of i) the expectation that rules will h...

This paper reports on the implementation of an advanced safety culture in a major oil and gas multi-national. The original proposal came from the company after it had become clear that expectations had been raised after the successful implementation of Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) Management Systems subsequent to the Piper Alpha disaster. T...

A framework for the development and maturation of organisational safety culture was formulated. The content of the framework was informed by 26 semi-structured interviews with oil and gas company executives, each very experienced in the industry. The form of the framework was based on Westrum’s [Westrum, R., 1996. Human factors experts beginning to...

Regulators, researchers and professionals in the oil and gas industry all agree on the importance of leadership commitment to HSSE. The right safety leadership is the most important factor in building a strong HSSE culture, but historically the focus has been on the workforce through traditional behavior based safety programmes. What this paper doe...

A framework for the development of organisational safety culture based on Westrum’s [Westrum, R., 1996. Human factors experts beginning to focus on organizational factors in safety. ICAO Journal October] typology of organisational communication had been formulated in a previous interview study. The framework had face validity based on the judgment...

Samenvatting Guchelaar et al. geven een gedegen overzicht van medicatiefouten in het ziekenhuis. Na een beschrijving van de omvang van het probleem en de gevolgen in termen van morbiditeit, mortaliteit en kosten trekken ze lering uit voorbeelden bij de luchtvaart en de petrochemische industrie. Ze analyseren het totale proces vanaf de totstandkomin...

In recent years medication error has justly received considerable attention, as it causes substantial mortality, morbidity and additional healthcare costs. Risk assessment models, adapted from commercial aviation and the oil and gas industries, are currently being developed for use in clinical pharmacy. The hospital pharmacist is best placed to ov...

The lack of an integrated approach to theories of human behaviour in the industrial environment forms an unaddressed problem for Psychology as a discipline. People behave as a totality whereas we only have local micro-models to explain specific behaviours in restricted environments. In this paper we present a comprehensive framework that makes expl...

In recent years medication error has justly received considerable attention, as it causes substantial mortality, morbidity and additional healthcare costs. Risk assessment models, adapted from commercial aviation and the oil and gas industries, are currently being developed for use in clinical pharmacy. The hospital pharmacist is best placed to ove...

This paper builds on the culture and behavioural change work presented at previous SPE conferences focusing specifically on a new model for "Safe Behaviour". This model has led to the development of intervention tools, piloted within Shell companies in Africa, Europe and Middle East. This work supplements the existing Hearts and Minds toolkit, by t...

For many years Shell, have shared at SPE conferences the insights gained from research together with universities of Leiden, Manchester and Aberdeen, into incident prevention and human behaviour. Some of the tools developed from this research, notably Tripod BETA and Tripod DELTA have been made available to the industry. During the last conference...

Since 1985 psychologists have been working to understand and manage the human factor in Health, Safety and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production. This work has led to the development of a model for organisational accidents, known as either Tripod or the Swiss Cheese model, and the development of tools for accident analysis and preve...

Failures in supervision are frequently found as a cause in incidents. Supervisors are predominantly promoted on the basis of their technical competence but soon discover that most of their work involves non-technical skills, such as planning and dealing with people. The Hearts and Minds brochure ‘Improving Supervision’ provides supervisors with a s...

The Hearts and Mind program was originally intended to develop intrinsic motivation in the workplace. Unlike many change and behaviour-based HSE programs, often based upon the use of common sense and experience, the Hearts and Minds program relies upon scientifically validated models to ensure robustness and effectiveness, but the supporting materi...

TX 75083-3836, U.S.A., fax 01-972-952-9435. Abstract The Hearts and Minds Project is aimed at developing intrinsic motivation for HSE. After an extensive review of the academic literature on motivation, with special emphasis on self-driven or intrinsic motivation, it was decided that the best way to establish an intrinsically motivated workforce wa...

High risk industries such as commercial aviation and the oil and gas industry have achieved exemplary safety performance. This paper reviews how they have managed to do that. The primary reasons are the positive attitudes towards safety and the operation of effective formal safety management systems. The safety culture provides an important explana...

Medication error forms a major proportion of the errors in the medical system. Despite many studies of adverse drug events, there are no systematic ways of ensuring safety, or of assessing how safe a pharmaceutical system is. Risk assessment is required in hazardous industries such as nuclear power or oil and gas. Risk assessments involve identifyi...

Rules and procedures form a major part of the system of barriers and controls As there is the assumption in a HSE _Management System that the rules and procedures will be followed, rule-breaking and other violations constitute a major threat to HSE management. This paper reviews earlier work on why people violate and introduces the ‘Lethal Cocktail...

The Hearts and Minds program is intended to move the basis for HSE performance past the mechanical implementation of HSE Management Systems. This paper describes an evolutionary approach to HSE culture and reports on a brochure that enables organisations and individuals to understand the HSE culture and their personal behaviours in the context of t...

In 1986 Shell International Exploration and Production started sponsoring a research programme to better understand why accidents occur and what can be done to avoid them. After 15 years of research involving the universities of Leiden, Manchester and Aberdeen it is time to take stock of the know-how that has been generated and analyse how this has...

Safety Culture is seen as a way of ensuring high levels of safety perfoin%ance in orgamsations, in contrast to the systematic engineered management of hazards and effects. This paper examines the notion of a saicty culture in ten%s of the characteristics of being infoimed and trusting. These notions are related to more general organisational din%en...

A study into different HSE tools reveals why some tools may be better than others. Tools can be structured along two dimensions. One dimension loads on how much a tool is a managerial, long-term aid, providing information for improvement. The other dimension loads on the extent to which a tool is applicable at the workforce level, helping to manage...

The Hearts and Minds project is being carried out to improve safety performance across the Oman oil industry. The objective is to identify how people can become intrinsically motivated for good HSE behaviour and to develop (micro-) tools to achieve such well motivated behaviour in a simple and effective manner, optimally tuned to the cultures in th...

A study is reported in which costs and benefits of safety are studied using three different approaches. Costs were split into Direct costs that arise as a direct result of an accident, Associated costs that arise because an incident is reported, Remedial costs and indirect costs that impact on the company. In an EP company a sample of 70 incidents...

The Hearts and Minds Project is aimed at developing intrinsic motivation for HSE. After an extensive review of the academic literature on motivation, with special emphasis on self-driven or intrinsic motivation, it was decided that the best way to establish an intrinsically motivated workforce was to develop a safety culture. This paper outlines th...

TX 75083-3836, U.S.A., fax 01-972-952-9435. Abstract The Hearts and Minds project is being carried out to improve safety performance across the Oman oil industry. The objective is to identify how people can become intrinsically motivated for good HSE behaviour and to develop (micro-) tools to achieve such well motivated behaviour in a simple and ef...

This paper studies the effect of slow cyclic variation of parameters on the phase of the oscillating Morris-Lecar model. In chemical oscillators it is known that a phase shift, called the geometric phase shift, is observed upon return to an initial point in parameter space. We find geometric phase shifts for a two-parameter variation in the Morris-...

This commentary discusses three main requirements for models of vision, namely, translation and scale invariance, scalability, and hierarchy. Edelman's Chorus model falls short of fulfilling these requirements because it ignores the highly dynamic nature of vision. Incorporating an attentional mechanism and assuming geon-like prototype represe...

The need for a simplified approach to the development and implementation of management systems is described. The potential benefit to be derived from a set of core organizational and management competencies is outlined. The systems approach and competencies are designed to actively eradicate or minimize the latent or potential causes of operational...

This paper reports a study carried out on the perceptions of supervisors, technicians and operators of the procedures for seven safety-critical activities. Using a questionnaire in which the subjects rated a variety of attributes, and ranked the different procedures in terms of dangerousness, controllability, susceptibility to violation, a mental m...

The criteria for making Go - No Go decisions are often conservative because the decision rule (i.e. to stop flying helicopters, to go around with a tanker, to shut down a platform or halt concurrent operations) does not take the interaction of multiple factors into account. All of the situations and events leading to an incident are sub-standard, b...

When the assumption that people will follow the procedures is broken the whole basis of the Safety Management System is put at risk. The main reasons for violation are: Expectation that the rules will have to be bent to get the work done; Powerfulness, the feeling that one has the ability and experience to do the job without slavishly following the...

This paper describes the SCAN (Signal Channelling Attentional Network) model, a scalable neural network model for attentional scanning. The building block of SCAN is a gating lattice, a sparsely-connected neural network defined as a special case of the Ising lattice from statistical mechanics. The process of spatial selection through covert attenti...

The explanatory gap refers to the lack of concepts for understanding “how it is that . . . a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue.” By assuming that there are colours in the outside world, Block needlessly widens this gap and Lycan and Kitcher simply fail to see the gap. When such assumptions are abandone...

To recapitulate, there are a great many ways of solving particular problems, a neural network is only one of them. We should stress that the approach is essentially one at the algorithmic level, together with possible implementational consequences in the future. For someone with a specific problem it is first necessary to analyse that problem in te...

This paper discusses the main architectural issues, the implementation, and the performance of a parallel neurocomputer, the Brain-Style Processor or BSP400. This project presents a feasibility study for larger parallel neurocomputers. The design principles are hardware modularity, simple processors, and in situ (local) learning. The modular approa...

Tripod-DELTA, the D iagnostic EvaLuation Tool for Accident Prevention1 based upon the Tripod model2, is aimed primarily at understanding how human error causes accidents. Instead of concentrating upon immediate or active failures, usually by front-line operators such as rig floor workers, helicopter pilots etc., Tripod stresses the existence of lat...

Tripod-DELTA provides a way of identifying latent failures, potential causes of accidents. This paper reports on how Tripod-DELTA was used in two E & P operational settings, Engineering and Drilling, to diagnose underlying problem's and set up systems to implement remedial actions. Implications for further implementation, with structured diagnosis...

Tripod Delta (diagnostic evaluation tool for accident prevention) is a checklist-based approach to carrying out safety "health checks." This paper describes the theoretical background of the approach, which is based on a model for understanding the role of human error in accidents. The method for constructing databases from which to make checklists...

Tripod Delta (diagnostic evaluation tool for accident prevention) is a checklist-based approach to carrying out safety health checks. This paper describes the theoretical background of the approach, which is based on a model for understanding the role of human error in accidents. The method for constructing databases from which to make checklists a...

In this paper, implementation possibilities of a synchronous binary neural model for solving optimization problems in massively parallel hardware are studied. It is argued that synchronous, as opposed to asynchronous models are best suited to the general characteristics of massively parallel architectures. In this study the massively parallel targe...

A new activation rule is proposed whose dynamic operation conserves the total activation in a neural network. Analogously to the standard stochastic dynamics that are based on spin-flip Glauber dynamics [1], activity-conserving dynamics are based on spin-exchange Kawasaki dynamics [2]. Through simulation studies, we show that stochastic activity-co...

An actual implementation of a real-time, neural network controlled, robot car is presented in this paper. The simple car consists of two motors and 4 light sensors. Supervised learning behaviour of the car is achieved by using a neural network with adaptive connections. The car can be taught to avoid obstacles. The controlling neural network is imp...

We propose the Gating Lattice as a model of the neural substrate for attentional selection. Dynamic gating requires the selection of patterns at an initial stage and their routing over one or more subsequent stages. It is assumed to underlie attentional processing. A network of stacked Gating Lattices realizes dynamic gating and copes with the prob...

The authors introduce the gating lattice as a parallel distributed model for adaptive sampling of visual images. A gating lattice is a parallel switch capable of dynamic gating, i.e., selecting and propagating one of several input patterns. Gating is distributed in that it is locally controlled. An example of a dynamic-selection problem is given, a...

The authors describe the integration of hardware and software components into a single neural network environment. The building blocks described are the BSP400, a massively parallel neurocomputer, and MetaNet, a general neural network design tool. This research is a feasibility study for future developments in large-scale integration of computation...

TRIPOD is a new approach to safety which stresses the importance of underlying factors in the causation of accidents. A diagnostic instrument, the Failure State Profile, has been developed using checklists of concrete indicators related to a specific set of General Failure Types identified as underlying accidents in exploration and production activ...

TRIPOD is an approach to safety aimed at the underlying problems which lead to accidents, in order to identify areas for remedial measures a Failure State Profile instrument was developed using indicators for the 11 different General Failure Types identified in TRIPOD. This study reports on an implementation in a desert drilling environment. Differ...