The Beginning
I didn't start in safety. I started in the field — doing the work, managing the operations, and learning firsthand what it costs when a safety program fails the people it's supposed to protect.
Nearly three decades in oil and gas across production, drilling, completions, workover, construction, and large offshore platform operations taught me something that no certification program can: the gap between a policy written in an office and what actually happens at the wellsite is where people get hurt.
I built Black Swan Consulting because I kept seeing the same problem at operator after operator — safety programs designed to satisfy regulators, not to protect workers. Programs written by people who'd never managed safety on a workover, never stood in front of a crew at 2 a.m. explaining hazards and risks to the operation, never had to make the call to shut down an operation when the economics were pushing hard against it.
"Experience is the only teacher that doesn't lie."
That's not a criticism of the people running those programs. It's a structural problem. Small and mid-size operators don't have the budget for a full safety department. They hire one person, or they outsource to a firm that sends a different analyst every time. The institutional knowledge never builds. The culture never changes.
Why Black Swan
The name is deliberate. In risk theory, a black swan event is characterized as unpredictable, catastrophic, and — in hindsight — inevitable given the conditions that preceded it.
That's exactly how most serious incidents in oil and gas unfold. They aren't random. They're the product of small, accumulated failures in systems that were never designed to catch them. Deferred maintenance. Normalized deviation. Production pressure overriding operational judgment. A company man managing tool rental costs during a wind shutdown instead of managing the operation.
These aren't mysteries. They're patterns. And they're findable before the event — if you know what you're looking for and you have the experience to recognize the signals.
Black Swan Consulting exists to find those signals. Before they become statistics.
How We Work
Black Swan is a sole-proprietor firm by design. When you engage us, you work directly with me — not a project coordinator, not a junior analyst assigned to manage your account.
That matters because safety consulting is a relationship business. The value isn't in the deliverable — it's in the judgment that produced it. A safety management system built by someone who's managed actual operations is a fundamentally different product than one assembled from a template by someone who hasn't.
We work with small and mid-size operators — typically 25 to 250 employees — across all phases of oil and gas. We're built for the companies that need real expertise but don't have the overhead budget for a large consulting firm with a full bench of generalists.
Every engagement starts with a Free Safety Gap Assessment — a structured conversation designed to surface the exposures you may not know you have. No cost. No commitment. Just an honest look at where your program stands.
The Philosophy
Black Swan's methodology is grounded in Human and Organizational Performance — a framework developed by researchers like Dr. Todd Conklin and Sidney Dekker that fundamentally reframes how we understand why incidents happen.
The traditional safety model looks for the individual who made the error and corrects that individual. HOP asks a different question: what did the system make easy? What conditions made the error likely, or even inevitable? What would a different person, in the same situation, probably have done?
This isn't soft science. It's the most accurate model of incident causation we have. And it produces fundamentally different — and more effective — safety programs than the blame-and-retrain approach that most operators still use.
When we investigate an incident, design training, or build a management system, that framework is the foundation. Everything we build is designed to work with human behavior, not against it.