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BP Oil Spill Transcript

Interview Transcript: Craig Triscari on the BP Oil Spill from an Incident Management perspective

Iris: Craig, how do you view BP's initial response from an incident management perspective?

Craig: I think the BP initial incident response was more of a linear way of responding to a crisis situation. What I mean by that is they didn't necessarily have in place a process that allowed them to think asymmetrically, but more linear, in their approach in developing responses and problem-solving for the incident that they faced.

Some of those examples are the BP president, who was an engineer by trade. And engineers are guided for a good part by the physics and mathematics of the world. And those are linear ways of thinking, not necessarily ways that are asymmetrical or not common ways of thinking.

Iris: Now, Craig, you mentioned that BP's leadership used a linear process of thinking, and that it would have been better had they been able to think asymmetrically. Can you explain more about what you mean by that?

Craig: Yeah, linear thought in the way of problem-solving firmly takes a stance that they will do one certain solution, or they will come up with one certain solution and that they will apply that solution and it will either be very successful, or it will fail. And if it fails they're able to take the data and information from that failure, recrunch those numbers, begin to develop another plan, and then implement that plan.

So, it's an approach method of resolving an incident. It's a step-by-step method of resolving. And so a linear way of thinking because you're just on one single line going to try to resolve one problem at the end of that line.

And in this case BP CEO, who was an engineer, had brought up on a scientific approach of doing this. And scientific approaches normally take mathematical or very physical ways of solving problems.

Now on the other hand of the spectrum you have an asymmetrical way of solving problems. Asymmetrical means that there's a multitude of different ways, and solutions, and things that can be applied to any particular incident as it occurs. So, if an incident does occur there's not one single answer in solving that particular problem. There may be some answers that are better than others, but you can actually approach resolving that incident using several different models at the same time.

So, not only for example, would you be digging a reserve well to stop the leak, nor would you be building several different cap systems for the well, but you would also be looking at explosives and other types of ways of stopping the oil to include burns being placed out all throughout that particular area as soon as the oil started spewing out the amount that it did.

Again, it took a long period of time before people started taking those approaches and saying that we have to try a multitude of different things at once, and not just one singular thing. And normally that occurs because the linear approach of doing things has not resolved the problem. And people then become worried/stressed that the problem will not be resolved, so they start throwing different things at it at a faster rate.

So, in the beginning if they're able to harness those ideas at a asymmetrical type of way in which they're able to collect those ideas very quickly and they’re able to implement them simultaneously to resolve the problem they might have been more effective and quicker in resolving the problem than they were through the linear approach they took.

Iris: And, Craig, what do you see as the most critical problems that BP faced in the way they approached this incident?

Craig: Now they faced several different problems during this incident. One of them being the command portion of the operations; who was in charge of this operation? Initially, just because the BP incident occurred in waters that required the federal government to be in charge, BP initially respond to those actions not as a supporting organization to the federal government, but as the primary organization which recovered from their problem.

So as the commanding portion of this operation BP initially did not want to take command of the problem, and that was very evident in the fact when all of the members, both BP, and Halliburton, and the other organization for Deep Horizon got together in front of Congress and all of them had been pointing their finger at each other. At the same time the federal government was pointing their finger at those three individuals, which begged the question who was in charge, and who was in command.

So, one of the big issues was that was not defined. The controlled portion dealing with the plan to recover from that type of operation was not there. They did not have the structure. BP did not have the structure in place to control the situation. BP did not have a plan, and the plan that they did have was very linear.

They decided that they were going to do one thing first, and if that failed they would move to another option. And if that failed potentially they had another option that they might be able to implement. But none of those options that came up were working at once. It was very linear in the way that they tried to respond to this incident.

The next part of the communication piece, I think anybody would agree that BP had a communication problem when communicating to the American people about what was being done for this particular incident. So, BP had a problem in communication. They were not able to identify their audience. They were not able to identify a theme, or message that would be able to resonate with the people within that region to not only help them understand the problem, but also energize them to help them solve the problem that they were facing at the time.

The fourth piece would be common operating picture, the overall picture of what was going on at the time. And, I would say in the first few weeks of the event there was massive confusion between the federal government and BP on what the picture actually was. Now some of the picture was hard to get based on the location of the incident.

But eventually they were able to project that common operating picture, what was going on, day to day, what they were doing day to day, and how they were orchestrating all of their resources to combine to make a difference in fixing the situation. That took weeks for them to develop, that common operating picture, and then communicating that common operating picture to the American people.

One of the last parts has been the intelligence they could have received from this type of incident in that they, again, were very linear in thought of who they could go to and what they can look at in order to help them solve this particular problem. They were less inclusive of many organizations who, and this was both BP and the federal government, in allowing individuals to come in with their expertise to potentially help in the situation.

And some of those were through their inability to get the ships that they needed in the area quicker. Some of the capabilities that they had in the area with pumps and other types of environmental protection systems that were available out there in the commercial market that they could have used that they did not tap into early on, but decided to go again internally dealing both with BP and then with the federal government to see what assets they had before they reached out to all these other organizations that were nearly at the beginning of the incident were saying that they could help, and they could help them resolve this situation more quickly.

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