GEISHA KOW­LESSAR ALON­ZO

The path to en­dur­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion­al re­silience be­gins with lead­er­ship that pri­ori­tis­es a ro­bust Health, Safe­ty, Se­cu­ri­ty, and En­vi­ron­ment (HSSE) cul­ture—a prin­ci­ple that took cen­tre stage at the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce of T&T’s (Am­cham T&T) 2025 HSSE Con­fer­ence.

Held un­der the theme “HSSE 360: In­no­va­tion for Re­silience,” the event con­vened in­dus­try lead­ers at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain on Tues­day to ex­plore how strate­gic fore­sight and in­no­va­tion can for­ti­fy or­gan­i­sa­tions against dis­rup­tion.

Among the voic­es shap­ing this di­a­logue was Jean An­dre Ce­lestain, CEO of At­lantic LNG Com­pa­ny of T&T, who em­pha­sised that hu­man cap­i­tal re­mains the cor­ner­stone of re­silience in the com­plex glob­al LNG mar­ket.

Ce­lestain de­scribed At­lantic’s work­force—backed by 25 years of in­sti­tu­tion­al knowl­edge—as its “true com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage,” and de­tailed the com­pa­ny’s mul­ti-pronged strat­e­gy to pre­serve and evolve this as­set.

Cen­tral to At­lantic’s ap­proach is the doc­u­men­ta­tion and trans­fer of in­sti­tu­tion­al knowl­edge through sys­tems like as­set man­age­ment plat­forms and suc­ces­sion plan­ning.

Recog­nis­ing the in­evitabil­i­ty of work­force turnover, the com­pa­ny in­vests in grad­u­ate train­ing and ap­pren­tice­ship pro­grammes to main­tain a healthy tal­ent pipeline.

How­ev­er, Ce­lestain em­pha­sised that re­silience is not sta­t­ic; it de­mands con­tin­u­ous adap­ta­tion to tech­no­log­i­cal and mar­ket shifts.

Dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is a cor­ner­stone of At­lantic’s re­silience strat­e­gy.

Ce­lestain high­light­ed ini­tia­tives such as in­ter­nal hackathons—once con­sid­ered ex­clu­sive to Sil­i­con Val­ley—as cat­a­lysts for in­no­va­tion with­in LNG op­er­a­tions.

These events have yield­ed tan­gi­ble im­prove­ments, in­clud­ing dra­mat­ic re­duc­tions in op­er­a­tional time­lines and en­hanced prob­lem-solv­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties.

For in­stance, a team of young en­gi­neers and op­er­a­tors re­duced a gas freight process from four days to just two hours, while an­oth­er young en­gi­neer de­vised a method to re­place a valve with­out shut­ting down a ma­jor pipeline.

Be­yond op­er­a­tions, the com­pa­ny fos­ters agili­ty across de­part­ments.

The fi­nance team, for ex­am­ple, short­ened its month-end clos­ing process from three weeks to eight days, re­flect­ing a broad­er cul­tur­al shift to­ward speed, ef­fi­cien­cy and cross-func­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Tools like ag­ile method­olo­gies and dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy pro­grammes are de­ployed to en­sure em­ploy­ees are not on­ly tech­ni­cal­ly equipped but al­so men­tal­ly pre­pared to em­brace change.

Ce­lestain al­so stressed the im­por­tance of align­ing em­ploy­ee pur­pose with na­tion­al im­pact.

He re­called how the LNG val­ue chain sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­pand­ed T&T’s econ­o­my in the ear­ly 2000s and how in­still­ing this sense of con­tri­bu­tion in em­ploy­ees fu­els mo­ti­va­tion and en­gage­ment.

Echo­ing this hu­man-cen­tric ap­proach, Do­minic Ram­per­sad, pres­i­dent of Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors Ltd, shared an ac­count of trans­for­ma­tion through strate­gic ac­qui­si­tions and cul­tur­al in­te­gra­tion.

Speak­ing about his ex­pe­ri­ence, Ram­per­sad stressed that in times of dis­rup­tion and un­cer­tain­ty, con­ven­tion­al so­lu­tions are in­suf­fi­cient.

In­stead, he cham­pi­oned an un­con­ven­tion­al yet val­ues-root­ed ap­proach to unit­ing dis­parate teams and build­ing or­gan­i­sa­tion­al re­silience.

At the heart of this trans­for­ma­tion was a stead­fast com­mit­ment to core val­ues—par­tic­u­lar­ly safe­ty and en­vi­ron­men­tal preser­va­tion, which are foun­da­tion­al across the NGC Group of Com­pa­nies.

Ram­per­sad un­der­scored that these val­ues are not just cor­po­rate slo­gans but cul­tur­al an­chors that fos­ter a sense of care and be­long­ing.

“When your em­ploy­ees feel cared for, they’ll work for you,” he not­ed, high­light­ing the hu­man-cen­tric ethos that guid­ed the in­te­gra­tion of new­ly ac­quired teams.

Re­dun­dan­cy crit­i­cal to re­gion­al tel­cos

This theme of re­silience through cri­sis was fur­ther il­lus­trat­ed by Si­mone Mar­tin-Sul­gan, vice-pres­i­dent of Lib­er­ty Caribbean T&T, who re­flect­ed on the af­ter­math of Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa in Ja­maica.

Speak­ing from her van­tage point with­in one of the re­gion’s lead­ing telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions providers, Mar­tin-Sul­gan framed the hur­ri­cane not on­ly as a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter but as a trans­for­ma­tive mo­ment for the busi­ness and its role in so­ci­ety.

“The dev­as­ta­tion set the coun­try back sig­nif­i­cant­ly,” she ac­knowl­edged, “but it al­so pro­vid­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty for us as Lib­er­ty Caribbean Flow to re­al­ly step for­ward and change the game.”

That game-chang­ing move came in the form of em­brac­ing satel­lite tech­nol­o­gy—specif­i­cal­ly, low-earth or­bit (LEO) satel­lites like Star­link—to re­store com­mu­ni­ca­tions in re­al time. For the first time, Lib­er­ty Caribbean was able to of­fer di­rect-to-cell con­nec­tiv­i­ty to over 150,000 Ja­maicans im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter the storm, en­abling emer­gency mes­sages and crit­i­cal con­tact when ter­res­tri­al net­works were down.

Mar­tin-Sul­gan said this shift re­quired a bold de­par­ture from tra­di­tion­al think­ing.

“We had reser­va­tions around the tech­nol­o­gy and the com­pet­i­tive na­ture of satel­lite ver­sus ter­res­tri­al,” she said not­ing, “But we showed a coun­try that we were ready to em­brace tech­nol­o­gy in the name of re­silience.”

This leap—from tel­co to tech­no—was not just about in­fra­struc­ture, but about mind­set. It demon­strat­ed to Lib­er­ty Caribbean’s work­force and stake­hold­ers that skep­ti­cism could co­ex­ist with in­no­va­tion, and that re­dun­dan­cy is es­sen­tial for busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity in a re­gion prone to cli­mate shocks.

The satel­lite de­ploy­ment al­so ex­tend­ed to B2B clients, help­ing busi­ness­es re­sume op­er­a­tions even as phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture re­mained com­pro­mised.

“This is how we evolve,” Mar­tin-Sul­gan not­ed, stat­ing, “This is how we move for­ward.”

She stressed that lean­ing in­to dis­rup­tion is not op­tion­al—it’s a strate­gic im­per­a­tive.

“If you don’t lean in­to it, it can be an ex­treme­ly ex­pen­sive oc­cur­rence for any op­er­a­tion.”

Lead­er­ship, she added, played a piv­otal role. Clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion, strate­gic trans­paren­cy, and a com­mit­ment to re­build­ing were cen­tral to Lib­er­ty Caribbean’s re­sponse.

“We don’t know what this looks like in six months,” she said, “But we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.Let’s get the coun­try back on tract.”

Mar­tin-Sul­gan em­pha­sised the re­al sto­ry wasn’t just about tech­nol­o­gy—it was about the peo­ple be­hind it.

“I think it was the re­silience of the work­force, ac­tu­al­ly,” she said adding, “We ex­pect­ed a hu­man re­sponse, a mo­ment of shock. But in­stead, they didn’t want to stop—they want­ed to keep go­ing. Em­ploy­ees stepped be­yond their usu­al roles, dri­ven by a shared sense of ur­gency and pur­pose. They said, ‘I know this isn’t my role when it’s busi­ness as usu­al, but be­cause the sit­u­a­tion war­rants it, I’m ready to step up.”

This spon­ta­neous adapt­abil­i­ty re­vealed a crit­i­cal in­sight: the need to co-train the work­force for dual roles—one for nor­mal op­er­a­tions, and an­oth­er for cri­sis re­sponse. “That was a learn­ing we didn’t quite put down on pa­per,” Mar­tin-Sul­gan ad­mit­ted, “but it’s one we’ll in­te­grate in­to our plans mov­ing for­ward.”

The hur­ri­cane re­sponse al­so sparked a cul­tur­al shift with­in the or­gan­i­sa­tion.

Em­ploy­ees be­gan to see the val­ue of in­no­va­tion and change, em­brac­ing a dy­nam­ic mind­set that proved dif­fi­cult to re­verse.

“They were will­ing to re­set the way they ap­proached op­er­a­tions, know­ing it wouldn’t be busi­ness as usu­al for quite some time,” she said adding, “Let’s adapt and ad­just—this is our new nor­mal.”

Mar­tin-Sul­gan sees this mo­ment as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bot­tle that en­er­gy and car­ry it for­ward.