(55ad) Leadership Archetypes and SENSE of Vulnerability - How to Promote Sustainable Cultures Focused on Operational Discipline, through Leadership

When an incident “surprises” an organization, unsafe conditions and behaviors, lack of barriers, and normalization of deviance may have been hidden behind a narrative of “invulnerability.”

These narratives of “invulnerability” are built every day, at every moment, in every situation in which incidents do not occur, whether due to a disciplined operation with adequate barrier management or as a product of complex notions such as false feedback. Different cognitive biases drive the tendency to consider that if something goes well today, it will go well again tomorrow. Or that if something didn't happen today, it won't happen tomorrow either.

Excessive confidence and complacency that, in an apparent paradox, feed on good results, are directly connected to a low sense of vulnerability and leadership without developed skills to make decisions based on risks, or immersed in contexts " strongly oriented to produce.”

Thus, when the incident occurs, “no one saw it coming.”

In many cases, real risks (those that cause fatalities or damage assets and the environment) and “perceived” risks are different. Thus, the actions defined and the barriers placed are usually a function of the perceived risks, and not necessarily the real risks.

This is where the development of this complex notion which is the sense of vulnerability takes a decisive role in the construction of strong leadership and cultures that manage based on risks.

The sense of Vulnerability has been defined as “the conscious and permanent perception of being in a risky situation that could cause damage to people, assets, and the environment.” Everything that keeps us attentive favors the sense of vulnerability; Everything that makes us complacent feeds the narrative of invulnerability.

In the present working paper we address, from a philosophical perspective adapted from the vision of the archetypes of the Swiss psychiatrist and essayist Carl Gustav Jung and combined with different qualitative works in some of the most challenging Oil & Gas operations in Latin America, the different stages of maturity that leaders go through, in relation to their sense of vulnerability. Likewise, we reflect the changes that occur as they advance in their organizational career and the impact of this dimension on the construction of culture.

In turn, we will go through the three key questions to develop thinking routines that boost the sense of vulnerability of leaders and their teams (“What can go wrong? How bad can it go? And how often can it happen? ") in the different hierarchical segments of an organization.

People develop their sense of vulnerability according to their lived experiences, but also to the impact of the systems in which they are immersed. If deviation normalization is high, the sense of vulnerability is likely to be low, indicating lower awareness of risks and greater tolerance for deviations. In contrast, if deviation normalization is low, the sense of vulnerability is likely to be high, indicating a greater awareness of risks, a lower tolerance for deviations, and a greater sense of operational discipline.

For this reason, the development of a sense of vulnerability is an inherent task of leaders in the current challenge of leading their organizations towards a sustainable future, as Mike Mullane, NASA expert in Combat the Normalization of Deviance, explains, “Risk has no memory.”