Nonrational Decision Making

This paper will explain some of the effects of three legal issues and three ethical issues surrounding the London-based British Petroleum Company’s involvement in the explosion of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. There are many legal issues surrounding this disaster, but the three this paper will focus on are the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, maritime laws, and criminal charges

MEJRI, Mohamed, and Daniel DE WOLF. 2013. "Crisis Management: Lessons Learnt From The BP Deepwater Horizon Spill Oil". Business Management And Strategy 4 (2): 67. doi:10.5296/bms.v4i2.4950.

The dilemma that could be identified with the BP Oil spill is no one wanted to take the blame when it first

From the onset, it is important to note that James and his vice president for production, John Healy, could have possibly prevented the scenario from escalating into a fully blown crisis by addressing the issue early enough. In my opinion, the company's top leadership should have acted during the second stage of the scenario, i.e. after concern deepened. The company's topmost executives instead chose to adopt the 'wait and see' stance.

The rational decision-making model describes a series of steps that decision makers should consider if their goal is to maximize the quality of their outcome. In other words, if you want to make sure that you make the best choice, going through the formal steps of the rational decision-making model may make sense. The following are the steps taken to come to a rational decision: 1. Identify the problem, 2. Establish decision criteria, 3. Weigh decision criteria, 4. Generate alternatives, 5. Evaluate the alternative, 6. Choose the best alternative, 7. Implement the decision, 8. Evaluate the decision.

Recently, oil spill management has become a serious concern and subsequently, it has become a big issue as it takes a large, specifically trained team effort to solve the devastating problem. It also requires consistent efforts of the workforce. The Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico was perhaps another major contributing factor to highlighting the need for Oil Spill Management to be addressed. The director of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement, Michael Bromwich stated that this oil spill proved that oil and gas organizations were not prepared to deal with oil spills. (Merolli, 2010).

Rational model emphasis on how conclusions should be completed therefore the nonrational model better fits the Deepwater Horizon Case (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013) . Showing focus on how the end is actually achieved is the nonrational model with assumptions of uncertainty in decision making, those making choice do not receive all the information, and the manager has challenges to make ideal decisions (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013). About the Deepwater Horizon case, all of the assumption listed are related at some point. A model that surfaced and explains that decision making can be chaotic and disorganized is garbage can model (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013). This model has interactions from several events that are involved such as participants, solutions,

the decisions made by BP and to some extent by Transocean and Halliburton, were the main reason for the

The series of ethical issues that took place leading to the disaster are complex, and other factors such as economic and political issues arose after the catastrophe happened. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ethical issues that took place before the disaster happened, and investigate the moral obligations, social responsibility and justice at an individual and organizational level. The ethical dilemma is broken down into three categories, which include the company’s management priority to reduce costs and time, neglecting safety issues addressed by staff, human misjudgment and errors in neglecting pressure reading; and finally, overlooking the technical design flaws that were not tested by BP before installing to use. The

According to Kreitner and Kinicki, 2016, p. 330,” decision making entails identifying and choosing alternative solutions that lead to a desired state of affairs. In this case the model of decision making that was represented the most is the nonrational model. Under the nonrational model I would say that more of the garbage can model was represented. In this case the decision made caused a catastrophic event to occur due to the leadership making sloppy decisions. “…the garbage can model of decision making assumes that decision making does not follow an orderly series of steps (Krietner & Kinicki, 2016, p. 334)”. In this case it seems to provide the decision makers with the proper tools needed to make the safest decisions, but they choose to

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 resulted in considerable damage to the environment, economy and human livelihoods. While BP, as one of the parties involved in the operation of the oil drilling on Deepwater Horizon rig, suffered huge financial loss and reputation loss, it was found to be the one to be mostly blamed due to its lack of risk management. As poor risk management can lead to an astonishing disaster like this, it appears to be necessary for every business to learn from BP’s mistakes and try the best to prevent such disaster from happening again. This report studies this case, focusing on two issues identified in BP’s risk management practices, namely its sloppy preparation for risks and its inappropriate communication strategy after the crisis happened. No evidence showed that BP had a sufficient emergency plan for the worst-case deep-water oil spill although the depth of the oil drilling was one of the deepest. BP’s unseriousness towards safety was also indicated in their attempt to shift blames to its contractors and the unaccountability shown by the words of BP’s executives during interviews. Based on the examination of BP’s deficiency in risk management, the lessons that can be learned from it are discussed. In brief, firstly, accurate risk assessment and appropriate emergency plan should be available before the operation is started. Secondly, post-crisis communication should show the world that the company cares and is accountable

Although the accident was caused by a mechanical failure, it spiralled out of control because of an insufficient safety system. BP acted inefficiently and their carelessness cost the lives of people and damaged the environment, nevertheless this does not mean they acted in an unethical way as

In the month of April 2010, Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing 11 workers and releasing oil from the well into an ocean. This paper will discuss BP management, ethical and social behavior. BP along with a few of its partners Transocean and Halliburton was involved in the gulf oil spill. The explosion of the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon was the root cause of the oil spill. This paper will focus on BP organization behavioral issues that caused the economic, environmental, and human losses. The research further focuses on what BP leadership could have done as a precautionary measure using highest ethics and management behavior.

In contrast, the Non- Programmed decisions which are type of decisions which are non-routine and deployed to resolve non-routine problems, they are relevant in solving unique and unusual problems that arises, of which the alternatives cannot be decided in advance. Non-Programmed decisions are usually of high importance and significance with long-term consequences on organizations, such decisions are decided at the top management level.

More specifically, they were trying to avoid the blame and further their individual motives. When I saw the film I thought to myself there’s no possible way this happens in real life, but the article shows two examples. The Challenger case as well as the Macondo Well blowout showed that even though engineers might have noticed a problem, in the end management or other engineers decided that it was safe enough to proceed. Then during the investigation, the leaders of the company or project managers decided to play innocent and ignorant. The other thing that I found interesting is the “practice defines facts” model. If correlations are found, then they become facts until they are disproven; this is the problem with the model. A fact should not be able to change, if a fact is truly a fact then the evidence should always support it. When we spread misinformation by stating a correlation is fact, it can lead to many people thinking that it is the truth. It goes back to the first articles we read in class about misleading information in science. Not only does the Macondo/Challenger article tie into the film that we watch it also ties into other topics that we learned about ethics. People in certain situations have an innate self-interest that hurts