Challenge and Selection

I work in the oil and gas sector, in particular working with wells that have been developed  miles down into the earth strata to produce hydrocarbon. The job relies heavily on  thinking in the abstract and imagination, as the human senses normally used to ﬁgure out  most things are almost fully disabled with something being so remote. In many cases  interpretation of data on things we see on our surface equipment accounts for ﬁfty  percent of our diagnosis on problems with the other ﬁfty being highly experiential with a  bit of gut feel thrown in for good measure. As you can imagine, this often leads to a wide  spectra of opinion on what really occurs with these wells and makes for good debate  amongst colleagues. The challenge however is that in a large corporate ﬁrm with its own  technology solutions, the process of getting to a consensus on how to ﬁx a strategic  problem can feel like going against the grain very quickly. That is where a good story  telling that works through the highs and lows of past solutions, re-discovering the pains,  learnings and connecting to the emotions of people can be quite useful.

Application  One example comes to mind where this technique was particularly useful. For quite some  time the ﬁrm had sown its navel into a particular group of technologies which had been  successful at eliminating sand production at surface from the wells. However well  reliability in the last two years had decreased signiﬁcantly due to major sand production  issues, hitting the production bottom line and cash ﬂow. Many of the senior managers  themselves had used the prior technologies, reinforcing their belief in its continued value  and in many cases ascribing the failures to other imaginative descriptions. In speaking  directly to many of them I had realised that they had unconsciously blocked or forgotten  their past successes and failures as they focused more on their corporate management  duties. I had researched an industry technology to solve our problems, but it would take a  journey into history to bring them into the present.

Insight and Approach

The technology I was proposing was easy enough to understand and in fact simple in  some ways to the ones that we were currently using to manage the well sanding issues.  Prior to getting into the story-telling itself, I had to do some research on the diﬀerent  managers backgrounds. Stuﬀ like what their experiences were that made them successful  and what made them stand out. Strengths and weaknesses and even their oﬃce  supporters were all pieces of data that I had collated. The act of story-telling itself took  place on two diﬀerent occasions between more junior and then senior managers and that  was deliberate so that the journeys could be tailored separately. For the junior managers  taking them back through their experiences as very successful individuals who  themselves found technologies or methods to solve challenges provided an avenue to  please Bothe their egos and also appeal to their past spirits of self-discovery. Bringing in  the new technology information and data from industry along with the “basics” of

corporate approval (budgets, contracts etc.) was just the icing on the cake once the  journey had started. For the senior managers however, story-telling had to be approached  from a more macro sense and scale of the industry challenges that were being brought to  roost at “home” and painting a visionary picture of where we could be going with the  uptake of my proposal. It wasn’t all smooth sailing though requiring a maverick trick of  actually bringing a sample of the technology physically into the space. Thats where  visualisation really assists with story-telling, something which I have beneﬁted from in this  course.

