Decision Making Biases And The Deepwater Disaster

Which decision making shortcuts or biases can you observe in this case? Explain your answer.

In terms of the anchoring bias, regularly revisit of the original decision based on the newly gathered data needs to be set up within the organization. Additionally, the decision maker should avoid the Confirmation Trap in which Bazerman and Moore (2009) argues that people tend to seek information that confirms their expectations and hypotheses. To recognize the bias, Mike Francis could

In the text, Kreitner and Kinicki (2013) states that decision making is one of the primary responsibilities of a manager, and the quality of one’s decisions can have serious consequences. As the title of this cause study shows Faulty Decision Making is the Cause of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. Faulty decision making or lack of any decision making is the key to this disaster.

The purpose of this research paper was to investigate the news media’s depiction of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. The coverage provided by the newspapers was compared to that of scientific journals to access their validity and insight. The reactions the coverage evoked on the public were also studied. The paper specifically addressed the media’s portrayal of the oil company versus that of environmental groups. It was found that the news media did not include the benefits the oil company had had on the people and economy of Alaska. It was also found that up until 1989, many Alaskans were opposed to environmental groups. Next, the paper followed the role the media played on the public’s emotions and subsequent government

to the Model of Risk Perception – Risk Reduction Behavior process as postulated by Bennett and Murphy (1997), efficient and effective disaster preparedness is dependent on risk perception, self – efficacy and the social environment (attitudes and subjective norms). Most often people are of the opinion that they are not at risk for disasters placing themselves and their families in imminent danger.

The Deepwater Horizon Disaster brought to the surface many poor decisions made by Transocean LTD and British Petroleum (BP). This disaster claimed eleven lives and devastated several ecosystems; taking years to rebuild. The garbage can model played a part in making the faulty decision of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster. This decision-making process is influenced by four variables: problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities.

In the determination of the decision making model utilized at the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it appears the etiology of the explosion was based upon a series of irregularities that cascaded into the final explosion (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013). The importance of this description documents the scenario is not based upon a single decision by one individual but a series of decisions by multiple groups. For obvious reasons, it can be asserted that a rational model of decision making was not used. There was incomplete information available and shared, there was no lack of emotion involved in the process, alternatives weren’t actively evaluated, and finally time and resources were at a premium (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013).

Confirmation bias describes our unconscious tendency to place more emphasis than necessary on information that is consistent with our own beliefs, hypotheses, and recent experiences and to disregard information that contradicts them (Meissner, Sibony, & Wulf, 2015). Then there is a bias of overconfidence which will cause executives to misjudge their own abilities, as well as the proficiency of the business. This will lead decision makers to imprudently take risks, because they assume they will able to control outcomes. Biases prevented decisions makers from seeing the situation clearly in the case of the BP oil spill. The biases affected the way information was cognitively processed which caused a major lapse in judgment which resulted in

A key cause of this disaster was the lack of adequate communication between BP and Transocean. BP did not share critical information with its contractors, and contractors did not share critical information with BP. As a result, employees often made critical decisions without a full approval for the context in which they were being made. Decision making processes did not sufficiently ensure that personnel fully considered the risks created by time and money saving decisions. There is nothing wrong with choosing a less costly or less time consuming alternative as long as it is proven to be equally safe. The problem is that, at least in regard to BP’s team, there appears to have been no formal system for ensuring that alternative procedures were

The e Deepwater Horizon oil spill at the Macondo well began on April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on 20 April 2010 killed 11 people and caused almost 5 million barrels of oil to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The spill covered 68,000 square miles of land and sea and triggered a response effort involving the use of nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant chemicals (Pallardy). Considered the largest accidental marine oil spill in history, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) resulted in widespread environmental and economic damage, the exact nature of which is only beginning to be understood (Shultz 59). This paper will address the causes of this unmitigated ecological disaster and discuss steps that need to be taken to prevent a similar disaster from occurring again.

It can also help influence other to support a decision once it has been made. Based on evidence currently available, BP did not suggest that their engineering team conduct a formal analysis on the risk factors for completing a successful cement job, therefore the Deepwater Horizon disaster occurred.

The model of decision making that is represented in this case is nonrational decision making. Nonrational decision making explains how decisions actually are made. One of the reasons that I chose nonrational decision making is that with all of the signs before the oil spill, BP oil neglected those signs. For example, before the oil spilled occurred more fluid was leaving the pipe than expected and the officials of BP and the crew never addressed problems. The article states that these signs continued for several hours, until the well exploded shortly before 10 P.M (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013). Another key issue about BP oil is that the company had a lot of infractions against them before the oil spill for not playing by the rules or for not complying

Deepwater Horizon took a downfall due to bad decision making. What was focused on was missed warnings, bad decision making, and workers disagreements within two companies hours before the April 20 inferno that arisen upon one of the worst environmental misfortunes in US history. Judgmental heuristics were present, which are “rules of thumb or shortcuts that people use to reduce information-processing demands” (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013, p.335). These shortcuts are knowledge obtained from past experiences that help decision makers with current problems. The overconfidence bias was also present which “relates to our tendency to be over-confident about estimates or forecasts” (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013, p.336). BP’s and Transocean’s approach was

British Petroleum is an organization with stakeholders all around the globe, so when something as big as the Deepwater Horizon spill happens; stakeholders all over the world are impacted. Key publics that were impacted include British Petroleum’s board of directors, employees, local businesses in the surrounding areas, and the environmentalists that got involved. The goal of our audience analysis is to analyze and predict the different behaviors and preferences among key publics in order to better communicate and effectively mitigate the effects of the Deepwater Horizon crisis. Throughout this audience analysis, we at British Petroleum aim to move our key publics through the stages of public development.

This information combines the heuristics, which are simple rules used to make judgements, and representativeness, which is the extent to which an event is representative of its parent population. This amounts to the reliance on representativeness heuristic, which can be mistakenly used to erroneously magistrate something to seem more representative than it should be (Representativeness heuristic - Breaking Down Finance, n.d., para. 1-7).