Monthly Reflections September 2026

Monthly Reflections September 2026

Dear Colleagues,

It was a pleasure to be back in Africa in September at Africa Oil Week in Accra, moderating a panel on digital transformation. My travels also took me to Houston to support the Safety Leadership Academy, to Amsterdam to speak at the International Association of Drilling Contractors’ HSE conference, and online to Rio to speak to the International Regulators’ Forum. These events all included important conversations to further our ambition to eliminate fatalities, permanent impairments and catastrophic process safety events. I would like to share some reflections on these topics this month.

Safety Leadership

Much is written and spoken about safety leadership. This is one area where I believe actions do speak louder than words. Those that talk but do not act create negative consequences by unintentionally condoning bad behaviours and eroding hard-earned trust. I was privileged to share the room with 27 strong safety leaders and a top group of faculty in the Safety Leadership Academy (link), a programme to foster inspirational safety leadership within our industry. I enjoyed being back in the classroom enabling learning and seeing such a positive change in the participants through the week. Amongst many insights covering self, team, organisation and wider industry, a key theme is how important showing genuine care is to safety performance (including through actions, not just words). Care builds trust. Care builds psychological safety. Care opens up the conversations needed to make lasting positive change. I would like to recognise the teams at IOGP, SPE and CEDEP (and in particular Johana Dunlop) for creating such an impactful program. We can all continue to learn, and I encourage everyone to remain curious and seek out opportunities, large and small, to learn. The Human Performance Principles (Report 810 (link)) require strong leadership to be effective. It is a common theme throughout much of what we do. Just as we can and must all be strong learners so we can and must be strong safety leaders, wherever we sit in our organisations.

Digital Transformation

Both in IOGP and at the Africa Oil Week panel Digital transformation and AI featured heavily – it is difficult to ignore the development pace and reach of the technology. I picked up lots of insights from the panellists.Here are a few: the best AI doesn’t remove the expert; it gives the expert better insights faster and augments people rather than replacing them; AI amplifies your data, good or bad, but it does not fix it; and value is measured in improvements to workflows and decision-making, not adoption of the technology.

Governance of AI development and use is top of mind not only with the AI companies but also with the International Regulators’ Forum, as evidenced by the number of questions raised on this topic. And with good reason. It is so important to be an informed buyer. IOGP Report 817-1, IOGP’s Principles for Responsible use of AI with Guidelines for Implementation (link) was published in 2026, and a subsequent publication on AI Risks and Mitigations is in development. There is very strong collaboration between the IOGP Digital Transformation and Safety Committees with a pipeline of opportunities that has already delivered Report 816 Vision-AI guidelines for HSSE applications (link) and Report 365-21 Guidelines for implementation of Active Fatigue and Distraction Detection (AFDD) (link) this year.

As my team keep reminding me, we must not rush the work we are doing within IOGP to develop and test AI models to improve our own workflows. IOGP is built on the reliability and quality of information. This requires a thorough approach and a deep understanding of how the AI models are operating to achieve the required outcomes with high confidence – i.e. augment our current workflows and people, not replace them.

Incident Reporting & Learning

The digital discussion emphasises the criticality of data quality and this is also true in our incident reporting and learning. The panel in Amsterdam explored complacency as a descriptor in incident investigations, concluding that it is too vague, carries different meanings for different people, assigns blame to individuals and does not make for impactful follow-up actions. I was able to delve into the IOGP data site (link) to review all of the incidents mentioning complacency, which was very insightful. We need to continue to improve our incident investigations and learning from normal work to provide high-quality data to enable better interpretation of trends and stronger actions that will make a real difference. I am starting to see more connections back to human performance principles in the review of incidents. This is still a huge opportunity area given the inconsistency across work sites in learning and application of what we know works. Our industry’s progress on incident reporting and learning from all work also attracted a lot of questions from the regulators, quite understandably.

Final reflections

My travels continue through Q4 2026 to join the IOGP Health and Security Committees and to speak at various events in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It is wonderful to meet so many inspirational people working tirelessly on the health, safety and security in our industry to further our ambition to eliminate fatalities, permanent impairments and catastrophic process safety events. Thank you for your conversations with me and your contributions to building a safer and healthier workplace.

Best wishes,

Tom

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