Monthly Reflections September 2025
by Steve Norton, IOGP Health, Safety, Security & Wells Director
Monthly Reflections September 2025
Dear Colleagues,
Earlier this month it was my pleasure to join the Safety Panel Session at Offshore Europe in Aberdeen. I would like to share my reflections from the panel
The theme of the Panel was Learning is Vital, one of the five IOGP Human Performance Principles. Offshore Europe 2025 was recognising over 50 years of North Sea oil and gas operations and the Panel members recognised how much safety has changed and safety performance has improved in this time. However, often the improvement has come at massive cost so clearly articulated by panel member Steve Rae, a survivor of the Piper Alpha tragedy, who described how the tragic events of that terrible night in July 1988 caused the industry to learn, change and make fundamental improvements in how we operate.
Steve, and the other panel members, also described how we must never be complacent when it comes to safety and how much more there is still to be done. Craig Wiggins, panel moderator and CEO of Step Change in Safety, shared the concerning trend in recent North Sea Process Safety performance and I was able to confirm that picture is repeated globally with Process Safety Events being the single biggest cause of fatalities in the IOGP 2024 Safety Performance data submitted by IOGP Members
The panel also discussed some of the things the industry is doing about continuous improvement in safety performance and in particular the theme of the panel, learning is vital. Katie Morton, Human Performance and Behavioural Science Lead at SLB, provided deeper analysis and insights of the IOGP 5 Human Performance Principles and the challenges of learning plus how to overcome these challenges. Gillian Urquhart, Regional HSE and Carbon Manager at bp, built on Katie’s learnings by describing examples from her own experience including the importance of learning from normal work (more information on this topic can be found in this IOGP publication).
In summary, learning is vital when it comes to safety improvement. We must be deliberate in learning from incidents and if leaders adopt and follow the Human Performance Principles to demonstrate trustworthiness and create the right safety culture, learning can become natural and normal before something goes wrong and an incident occurs.
Kind regards,
Steve
