Human factors influencing decision-making: tendencies from first-line management decisions and implications to reduce major accidents

Decision-making processes are in the helm of organisations, constituting an essential capability to promote companies’ missions. Major accidents, however, can deeply affect the continuity of operations, and many of the findings arising from recent investigation reports relate to poor managerial decisions, triggering operational sequences which result in undesirable outcomes. Thus, the purpose of this study is to analyse first-line management decisions, in order to reveal common patterns affecting human factors and improve decision-making processes. Management decisions from the worst accident occurred in offshore Brazilian waters in the past fifteen years are scrutinised, using the publicly-available investigation report from the regulatory bodies as basis. Then, a data mining approach will be applied to a major-accident dataset, and analogous tendencies are revealed and compared with the case study. Problems arising from human factors associated with the lack of managerial rules and principles are investigated, and implications to improve decision-making processes are discussed.