COVER STORY Following the Crowd How Drilling’s Tribal Attitudes Feed a Risky Safety Culture I often talk about our self-taught, tribal ways of operating. We are a tribal industry, and the tribalism of our industry makes us equally great and not so great. What is tribalism? Behavior and attitudes that stem from strong loyalty to one’s group. We belong to the elite tribe of drilling professionals. Our tribe is responsible for dis-covering the unknown to provide water, natural resources, geotechnical information and installation of critical infra-structure. The greatest aspect of our tribe is our ability to adapt to challenging conditions by applying alternative methods, designing custom tooling or engineering a new solution. The not-so-great aspect of our tribe is when we 12 NATIONAL DRILLER | SEPTEMBER 2020 | NATIONALDRILLER.COM By Brock Yordy shift from safe, smart solutions to completing the job by any means necessary. This reckless aspect of tribalism fosters a culture of oper-ating in unsafe, high-risk conditions and accepting those con-ditions as standard. Beyond accepting dangerous situations as a daily occurrence, a portion of the tribe glorifies those high-risk conditions. Working in unsafe conditions has, to an extent, become a competition. Who can challenge fate the most before a catastrophic event occurs? As an industry, it will take the entire tribe to change our culture of accepting high-risk conditions as routine operating procedures. As a tribe, how do we create a better safety culture? The
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