Risk in Mind, Risk in Action: Human Factors, Bandura, and the Oil & Gas Imperative.
Dr Arthur Stuart Firkins (June, 2025)
Imagine standing on the steel-gridded walkway of a North Sea platform, the wind tugging at his collar as machinery hums rhythmically below. This is no abstract theatre of risk — it’s a visceral, human reality. Out here, decisions aren’t made in PowerPoint decks but in moments of pressure, uncertainty, and instinct. A misjudged call doesn’t just threaten a schedule — it can unravel lives, ecosystems, reputations, and it has all too often.
I have seen it too often: risk framed as a number, a probability buried in a report. Useful, yes. But incomplete. Because behind every switch flipped, every alarm dismissed, every protocol overridden, there is a mind — shaped by stories, shaped by belief.- and AI is a useful tool in this context, not a total solution.
The Cognitive Core of Risk
Albert Bandura’s theory posits that behaviour is shaped by the dynamic interplay between personal factors, environmental influences, and actions. In oil and gas, this means that a technician’s decision to override a safety protocol isn’t just a procedural lapse — it’s the product of perceived norms, past reinforcement, and their belief in their own competence.
Firkins’ Risk in Mind framework builds on this by emphasizing how risk is framed and communicated within organizations. His work highlights that risk perception is not merely a function of data, but of discourse. In environments where safety messages are top-down, abstract, or culturally misaligned, workers may construct alternative narratives — ones that normalize shortcuts or silence uncertainty.
Human Factors: The Missing Link
Despite decades of safety innovation, human error remains a leading cause of major incidents in oil and gas. Human factors engineering has made strides in interface design and workload management, but without addressing the why behind behaviour, interventions risk being superficial.
This is where Bandura and Firkins converge. Bandura’s emphasis on observational learning and modelling suggests that safety culture is transmitted not through manuals, but through mentors. Firkins’ discourse-based approach reveals how these cultural scripts are embedded in everyday language — what is said, what is left unsaid, and who gets to speak.
Toward a Reflexive Risk Culture
To operationalize this integration, oil and gas organizations must move beyond compliance checklists and toward reflexive risk cultures — environments where individuals are empowered to question assumptions, share near misses, and co-construct safety narratives.
This means:
- Training for self-efficacy, not just task competence — workers must believe they can act safely, even under pressure.
- Embedding narrative audits — analysing how risk is talked about in meetings, briefings, and informal settings.
- Designing for dialogue — creating spaces where frontline insights shape policy, not just the other way around.
The implications stretch far beyond the oil fields. Across industries — from finance to aviation, healthcare to tech — the same human dynamics govern risk. Wherever people face uncertainty, they draw from internal narratives, modelled behaviour, and environmental cues.
Whether it’s a trader under pressure, a surgeon in the OR, or a cybersecurity analyst scanning anomalies, the Risk in Mind perspective reveals a universal truth: risk is rarely just a matter of rules — it’s a matter of meaning. For risk managers, this reframes the task ahead. It’s not only about mitigating hazards, but about shaping cultures of clarity, agency, and dialogue.
The key takeaway? Equip people not just with protocols, but with the psychological tools to believe they can speak up, act wisely, and adapt under pressure. Because when risk lives in the mind, resilience can take root in the everyday choices of everyone, everywhere.
Conclusion: From Risk Management to Risk Meaning.
In the volatile terrain of oil and gas, the future of safety lies not just in better systems, but in better stories. By integrating Bandura’s psychological insights with Firkins’ communicative frameworks, we can begin to see risk not as a number to be minimized, but as a meaning to be negotiated.
Because in the end, it’s not just about managing risk — it’s about understanding how people make sense of it.
References
Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American psychologist, 37(2), 122.
Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American psychologist, 44(9), 1175.
Biography
Dr Arthur Stuart Firkins is a behavioural scientist, educator, and risk expert. With extensive experience in risk assessment and management and the Author of Communicating Risk (Springer 2016). Dr Firkins has developed innovative approaches that blend behavioural insights with strategic risk framing, which is elaborated on the Risk in Mind medium publication site, based on his 2012 research Discourse and the Framing of Risk.
His research challenges conventional risk communication, emphasizing how societal actors actively construct risk perspectives. Through his work, Dr Firkins continues to influence the fields of risk management, risk communication operational risk, providing organizations with practical frameworks for managing uncertainty effectively. He can be contact at [email protected]
Dr Firkins is a proud supporter of Dave Magee founder of OSH Literacy — A life skill. A charity which teaches Health & Safety Literacy as a life skill in Developing countries World Wide.
