Session 7. Oral Presentation for: Culture as control: the invisible threads that prevent disasters

Presented on 19 May 2026: Session 7 Culture in oil and gas is not a program. It is the pattern of behaviour and decisions made during real work, shift by shift, and it acts as a control on barrier integrity. When the focus is sharp and anchored to critical risk, barriers hold. When it is blurred by competing priorities, controls drift. Piper Alpha, Deepwater Horizon, and Buncefield show the same storyline: valid certificates, plausible local decisions, and catastrophic failure. The lesson is clear: engineering and systems are essential, but not enough. This paper introduces the Global Weave Critical Risk Model®, developed by The Jonah Group in 2014. The model treats culture as part of the control set by mapping 18 non-technical global controls interlaced with technical controls across multiple major hazards. Read as a net, vertical lines represent hazard pathways and their key technical controls, and horizontal lines represent organisational threads such as leadership, contractor management, maintenance, management of change, supervision, and weak signal reporting. Where those threads fray is where major risk accumulates. The paper shows how to use the Global Weave Critical Risk Model® as a simple net across operations to make the critical threads visible and manageable, deepen investigations beyond ‘operator error,’ focus strategy on a small number of high leverage controls, and bring human and organisational factors to field risk assessment tools. Rather than launching more culture programs, it supports doing less, with greater precision, by tightening the few threads that most determine whether barriers perform when needed. To access the Oral Presentation click ‘Supplementary data’ below. To read the full paper click here