Is Your Operation Drifting Into Failure?

Somewhere in your operation right now, a well-site supervisor may be managing costs instead of managing the operation. It's rarely a conscious choice. The system around them changed what "managing" means, quietly enough that nobody decided to change it. It just happened that way.

The Shift You Might Not Have Noticed

Your field supervisors used to manage operations, with cost as one factor among many. Somewhere along the way, that relationship may have inverted. Cost stops being part of what your supervisors manage and becomes how they manage, and the operation starts happening inside a cost decision instead of alongside one.

Here's what that can look like in the field. A rig gets shut down for high wind. The company man spends nearly two hours on the phone and texting with the field superintendent. Not about the safety of the shutdown, not about the operation, but about whether to send in a tool because of what the rental will cost for the hour it sits idle.

The tool was never the real issue. If this is happening on your locations, the real issue is that cost has become the primary lens your supervisors use to make operational decisions, while the operation itself waits on the sideline. It's the kind of call that looks minor from the office and looks very different from the rig floor. Whether it's your operation's pattern is worth checking honestly, not assuming.

This Pattern Has a Name

Sociologist Diane Vaughan studied this exact dynamic in her research following the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. She called it the normalization of deviance. In plain terms, an organization keeps seeing the same departure from its own standards, nothing bad happens right away, and eventually that departure just becomes how things are done, even though it still breaks the organization's own rules.

At NASA, engineers observed O-ring erosion on flight after flight with no resulting catastrophe, until flying with the flaw became routine, right up until it wasn't.

Sidney Dekker, building on this research, coined the term drift into failure. Your incidents won't usually come from one dramatic breakdown. They'll come from a situation that, on almost any other day, would have turned out fine. The drift happens gradually, each step small enough to defend on its own, until the cumulative distance from your original standard becomes the thing that hurts someone.

That pattern may already be running somewhere in your operation. Not one bad decision, but a slow accumulation of small ones, each individually defensible, each one moving your baseline further from where it started.

What Actually Fixes This

I asked a completions supervisor I've worked with for years what he thought it would take to reverse this shift at his company. After a pause, his answer came down to trust. Leadership has to trust the workforce enough to let them make operational calls without a cost interrogation attached to every one. And the workforce has to trust leadership enough to believe that raising a safety concern won't cost them their standing.

This isn't a training fix you can hand off to HR, and it isn't a new procedure to add to the binder. If normalization of deviance is happening at your company, your existing procedures were probably fine. The drift didn't happen because the paperwork was wrong. It happens when leadership stops actively reinforcing what "normal" looks like, and your people learn through repetition that the hourly cost of a tool outranks their own operational judgment.

Here's a concrete place to start. This week, ask one of your field supervisors to walk you through the last operational call they second-guessed because of cost, not to audit them, but to listen. If they can't think of one, that's information. If they can, ask what would have made that decision easier. The answer will usually point you straight at the gap.

This industry has taught me one consistent lesson across nearly three decades. The drift is always happening somewhere. The real question is whether your organization notices it now, while it's still just a pattern, or later, when it's the story people tell about how no one saw it coming.