Real-world decision making in the upstream oil and gas industry—prescriptions for improvement

Abstract

Business under-performance in the upstream oil and gas industry, and the failure of many decisions to return anticipated results, has led to a growing interest in the past few years in understanding the impacts of decision-making processes and their relationship with decision outcomes. Improving oil and gas decision making is, thus, increasingly seen as reliant on an understanding of the processes of decision making in the real world. There has been significant work carried out within the discipline of cognitive psychology, observing how people actually make decisions; however, little is known as to whether these general observations apply to decision making in the upstream oil and gas industry. This paper is a step towards filling this gap by developing the theme of decision-making process. It documents a theoretical decision-making model and a real-world decision-making model that has been distilled from interviews with many Australian upstream oil and gas professionals. The context of discussion is to review the theoretical model (how people should make decisions) and the real-world model (how people do make decisions). By comparing and contrasting the two models we develop a prescriptive list of how to improve the quality of decisions in practice, specifically as it applies in the upstream oil and gas industry.

Human Decision-Making in the Oil and Gas Industry

“…In previous papers the authors have discussed the need to understand both decision type and decision process in order to improve decision-making (Mackie at al, 2007, Mackie et al, 2008. This paper summarises that work and then demonstrates the need to tailor decision process to decision type in order to move towards optimal human decision-making in the upstream oil and gas industry.…”