Wherefore art thou, Expert?
Matt HallI don't buy the notion that we should be competent at everything we do. Unless you have chosen to specialize, as a petrophysicist or geophysical analyst perhaps, you are a generalist. Perhaps you are the manager of an asset team, or a lone geophysicist in a field development project, or a junior geologist looking after a drilling program. You are certainly being handed tasks you have never done before, and being asked to think about problems you didn't even know existed this time last year. If you're anything like me, you are bewildered at least 50% of the time.
Yesterday
I don't know if things ever actually worked this way, but there's a general idea that oil companies used to do most things on their own. They had lots of petrophysicsts, processed seismic data, did their own training. And life was good, and oil was easy to find, so the story goes. I've written about this before. Then, starting about 15 years ago, connected no doubt with one of the many busts our industry enjoys, there was a boom in outsourcing. Experts in seismic acquisition, petrophysics, and other critical niches all but vanished: fired, retired, or gone off to work at a service company.
Today
There are still lots of petroleum geologists and geophysicists around, but it's not enough. They are stretched, and supported by fewer technologists than ever. Valuable specialists are as good as gone (if you have to wait more than a couple of days for help, they effectively don't exist); even if you can find one, the chances are good that they are inexperienced in unconventional resources. On top of this, society craves resources we don't have, requiring us to be more imaginitive than ever and leading us to bitumen, shale gas, hydrates... plays which barely existed 10 years ago.
The result
No wonder oil industry professionals are often left to figure things out on their own. Don't get me wrong: this is awesome. It's fun, empowering, and a fantastic opportunity. But it's hard too: you make mistakes, sometimes it's stressful, you feel things could be better with a little help. Jobs like planning a $20M seismic shoot, getting $200k of lab work done, writing a Request for Proposals for a $400k environmental impact assessment are hard when you don't know what to ask for, or not ask for. This is why, when you get a report back (some seismic data, say, or X-ray diffraction analyses), you see this:
- You ask for digital data and get a PDF (ha!) or bizarrely formatted Excel file
- There is no mention of precision or accuracy, and the lab can't answer basic questions about either
- The reporting is incomplete, e.g. weight-percent is reported for XRD data, but never volume-percent
- The samples were collected from 'near' where you wanted them (you may never find out where exactly)
- All the core photos are upside down (this is normal in Alberta, don't get me started)
- A crucial and routine processing step was missed 'because no-one asked for it'
Now, I happen to be interested in lab methods, but I don't want to have to seek out a specialist just to help me get what I need. I want to focus on interpreting data and making better decisions. So when I outsource lab work, just as I have outsourced dentistry and landscape gardening, I expect the hired professional to bring their judgment and experience to me. I don't know what kind of dental resin to use, or what kind of plants like poorly drained ground: that's the whole point of outsourcing.
What can we do about it?
Geoscientists can stop worrying about expertise and not having enough of it. Half the things you are trying to do have no expert; tomorrow, you will be the expert. Just keep learning, reading, getting involved in research opportunities, and talking about or publishing your ideas. Most importantly of all: ask the stupid questions no-one else will ask, and challenge the way things are done. Seek out opportunities to innovate.
Specialists can think about how to build shallow tools that expose deep domain knowledge to non-specialists. You may need to seek help with this, because it looks like 'dumbing down'. By all means, build thick manuals, 5-day training courses, and 100-step workflows, but don't forget to layer checklists, cheatsheets, and simple heuristics on top of it, as Evan has been advocating. You could think of this as user experience design for knowledge.
Service companies can step up to this challenge too. Talking about awesome customer service isn't enough: you have to actually do it. Think long-term, build trust, invest in customers not with hockey tickets but with science, be a partner not a vendor. Above all, refuse to let your sales team and management infect your technical people with quotas and growth targets. Read Maister's The Trusted Advisor
The expert is dead! Long live the bewildered generalist.
Reader Comments (12)
Great post, some solid advice here.
As an aside, another specialty that, unfortunately, gets outsourced is biostrat -- on top of that, the number of micropaleo experts being produced is steadily declining.
@Brian: Thanks for reading. Biostratigraphers, palynologists, micropalaeontologists... you're right. Maybe we need an endangered species list. Stop the palynologist cull!
Seriously, these extreme cases bear thinking hard about, because somewhere in between university teaching and research, industry specialists, and industry practitioners, there has to be a way to (a) continue to develop and push boundaries, but also (b) to make digestible, shallow, usable tools.
Interesting post! I find that the size of a company and the amount of outsourcing are inversely proportional. Most large integrated companies pride themselves of having in-house specialists ranging the entire spectrum. My personal experience is that this in-house expertise generally leads to significantly better technical work.
But what does that mean? How does this seemingly better technical quality translate to success? I'd say if you look at the development of unconventional plays in North America and globally, it's the junior companies with limited staff and lots of technical outsourcing that are getting the acreage early and generating the activity in the market.
Maybe it's not just the quality of the technical work, but how you use it. And it seems like the juniors with busines savvy and an entrepreneurial spirit are doing much more with much less.
Interesting comments. I tend to agree with you that the service or specialist providors have a big role to play. Having been on both sides, good early communication and continuous communication is required throughout every phase of any project. Just having left employment with a super major, I relied on the service company to keep me updated on new developments in their field and I was quite happy to pay for this service. However, whilst working on the service side - I was continuously pressurized to reduce costs and get the cheapest data to the client in the quickest possible time. I wish I had been stronger during those days.
Any problems with format although a small issue is firmly in the camp of the Operator, if the service company does not deliver they need to know. Take the time to document everything and communicate this to the service compamy. If the service company does agree with these suggests - discuss and adjust accordingly. Every project is different.
But remember there are specialists and then there are specialists in certain aspects of a specialist subject. Petrophysics is one of these - there are specialised Petrophysics ( core, wireline, rock physics, geomechnics etc) - and you try to be on top of all these, but it is difficult to be an expert in all. Petrophysics basics can easily be taught - but an experience Petrophysicist, who has seen many issues through his/hers working life time is worth their weight in gold.
@j: It does seem curious that many companies are obsessed with growing, yet end up doing worse than their smaller competitors. Interesting too that Marathon and ConocoPhillips have recently decided to split up operations and go back to being smaller companies. Of course, there are other factors at play there too.
In my darker moments I tend to think the technical work is irrelevant, since big strategic things tend to be driven by less tangible things like markets, investors, competitor behaviour, executive egos, and so on. But then I remember amazingly successful exploration businesses like Duvernay, whose chief often asserts that subsurface science is central to their success.
@Petrafiz: Thanks for reading and commenting. "Every project is different" is so true. I think it's a constant frustration to corporate management, who can't understand why success are hard to repeat and failures hard to predict. It's also one of the reasons experts can never be our saviours. Which isn't to say I don't think we need specialists, and people with deep but narrow experience. We absolutely do — and besides, some people are drawn to that style of thinking, so we're going to have them anyway. We need them more than ever, but they are so sparse that I think we need them to help us in a different way, to apply their deep domain knowledge in a more distributed way. Cheers! M
Great stuff! This ranks way up there along with The Sermon on the Mount etc. But it's not new....some years back one of the early log analysts retired and at his going away party was asked about his daily routine at the office that always started with him unlocking his desk drawer, taking out a 3 by 5 card, reading it and locking it back up again. Under gerat pressure he finally let the assembled company know that on the card he had printed: "Remember, SP on the left, Resistivity on the right".
Richard Bateman
@Richard: HA! That was funny. Not a joke you get to tell every day :)
I'm having a little trouble buying into your dentistry or landscaping analogy. For example, if you are only going to the dentist for a particular service and not a full suite of what might be regarded as normal dental activities, you can't fairly complain if the full service was not provided - right? Likewise, if you go to a service company and make clear what your expectations are, that is if you'd like to see volume percentage compositions rather than what XRD alone provides, did you provide porosity information for each of the samples (cores, sometimes cuttings, sometimes just rocks) you've submitted, or did you request some other analysis that will yield this information, or are you willing to allow for spectulatively provided porosity from the lab? It seems to me that this issue is one of ownership of the project. Either you want ownership and take all the necessary measures to understand what you are asking for and how to reconcile the infomation you have with other tidbits of data, or you can complain that the information you've received does not meet your expectations (because you didn't request what might be available). But who is responsible, and if it is not you, then who is paying for that missing element?
@Steve: Thanks for the comment; you got me thinking again. But I want to stand my ground, even with my hokey analogies. Assuming that I trust she has my best interests at heart, I actually do expect a dentist to recommend services or alternatives that I didn't ask for. I certainly don't expect her to simply follow instructions, only to find out later that she'd have done something different if only I'd asked her advice.
To bring it back to a more petrophysical example, when I pay for a well log, I expect to receive a product I can use. As often as not, in my experience, I get a poorly-calibrated set of un-merged runs that need QC and petrophysical interpretation before I can use them. There are spikes, negative values, casing overlaps, etc. (I want the raw data too, naturally). For whatever reason, we get full service from geophysical contractors, but the service levels seem to be different in well logging.
As for who pays for this missing element—what I'd call simply professional excellence—I don't know. In the long run, it's the contractor: they pay for it with missed opportunity and lost market share.
Matt,
Thank you for the response. I believe I see your point. It is true that good service is often hard to find and that changes in our business models and economies are not always to the benefit of the consumer of those services, nor I might add to the employees of the service companies. Likewise, we agree that it is reasonable to expect to be informed of any anomolies that become apparent, especially if noted by those paid to provide the service. However, the contract for work is one of shared responsibilities for the exchange to work well. Ultimately, as the guy on the front line providing skills to your employer as shepard over the business in that field, basin or segment of the business, it is your responsibility to provide that professional excellence in overseeing the operations and making sure that the data you receive is not only meaningful and digestible, but as well, simply reasonable. Likewise, the service provider has the obvious responsibility to meet your expectations and indeed to do so with excellence in their execution wherever practical - you should insist on it. But expectations are best communicated up front so that both parties understand and agree that the expectations are indeed reasonable. The case in point that seemed most telling was your comment about such things as volumetric percentages vs weight percentages in XRD reports, presumably after the fact, when you may singularly be in possession of key knowledge to be able to make that fairly simple conversion if the porosity is known.
@Steve: I guess it's all about early, open communication. Probing questions from contractors will help inexperienced non-specialist geologists get what they (really) need, especially in areas where contractors are likely much more experienced. I like the XRD example because many geologists don't even realize that the results are %weight, and have only a dim understanding of why they might (usually?) care more about %volume. Then again, I have seen lab contractors, who should know better, misusing weight% data too, especially when dealing with tricky things like low-density organic matter content in shales.
Just a note on the name of the post. Wherefore art thou doesn't mean "where are you", it means "why are you". Juliet is lamenting the fact that Romeo is, by fate, a Montague, the enemies of her own family.