Open Safety Dialogue (OSD); - After 6 More Years
Authors: Løvby Terje , Dahl Tor Alrik 
Published: July 2010

OSD addresses only personnel safety issues and relevant behaviour.

We have over the last 6 years accumulated extensive additional experiences running such a challenging program; including gaining, at least for us, significant new knowledge both with respect to human and organizational behaviour as well as personnel safety issues.

The scope of this paper is to share with readers both facts, experiences and our thoughts about: Personnel Safety ManagementRisk Assessment on a Personal LevelChange of BehaviourSpecial challenges in larger organizationsOur Safe Behaviour ProgramOpen Safety Dialogue (OSD)The Peer ProgramOSD Program experiences and advice to "followers"

The OSD Program has at this stage taught more than 7750 supervisors1 the OSD psychological foundation and methodology during a one day course with normally less than 7 participants on each course. We have in addition provided extra motivation and practical training for close to 1500 of these, after the initial course, by visiting their installations (offshore and onshore) and coaching them on a one-to-one basis after participating with these supervisors in real time OSDs with individual workers or teams at the work sites during ongoing jobs.

We (the authors) have, as an added effect of this necessary support activity at the "front end", gained a rather unique volume of experiences about work site safety behaviour in real time situations.

The two of us have, in sum, participated actively in more than 5000 work site OSDs over the past 5 years, and seen everything from outstanding safety performance to imminent disaster scenarios.

This is far more than any other supervisors in our company, and we strongly believe that this represents a unique observations base by most standards. We intend to share with you some of our observations, experiences and opinions based on this exposure to reality.

We will also state what we think are the significant obstacles and challenges, facing behaviour modification program in our business and the world at large.

Paper layout

We have included several examples we feel may be relevant for understanding. This increases the size of our paper significantly. We have placed the majority of our examples into a separate end section, in order to facilitate easier reading of the main body, and refer to these from the main text in this format [Ref. - Ex A0].

"Disclaimer":

Although the authors work for a Norwegian oil company, and are based in Norway, we do not believe any of these issues are limited to our company or country. We have interacted with a large number of nationalities and visited multiple countries over the past 10 years. We have also had our observations and views confirmed by OSD course participants both from contractor companies and our own company from a vast list of countries, who have through their prior careers worked in multiple professions for, and with, companies of all kind of sizes, nationalities and business types.

We are of the opinion that most of the issues and challenges we describe in this paper are of a general nature, unless the opposite is clearly stated in our text.

We find it at this stage very appropriate to start with the statement which closed our previous paper:

Afterthought (in 2004)

We did not really appreciate how utterly true it was back then…..