A sleeping tiger may not be an obvious mascot for a safety message at an exploration and production company, but it’s a perfect metaphor to represent situations that can, at any moment, awaken and cause serious damage. Proactively identifying and addressing these situations can prevent serious incidents.

The concept was conceived after investigations into previous health, safety and environment (HSE) incidents found that failure conditions or system weaknesses often existed prior to the event, meaning that there was an opportunity to reveal and address exposures prior to them resulting in incidents. Essentially, there was plenty of potential to find the “sleeping tigers” before they awakened.

Learning can help us identify those conditions, and it begins with a leadership-enabled mindset in several key areas:

• Response to failure: Suspend judgement, respond to failure with curiosity and seek to understand the context.
• Curiosity: Ask different questions and have a questioning attitude.
• Chronic unease: Maintain a healthy sense of unease and be alert to weak signals.

“Improving our HSE performance very much hinges on our ability to continue to learn, therefore we must find other ways and means to continue to discover the weaknesses in our systems and shortfalls in safeguards. We need to get better at revealing the sleeping tigers before they awaken into an incident,” said Vice President, Health, Safety and Environment Dirk Faveere.