Speech Transcript of "The ExploCrowd Way of Working" presentation
at the Lundin // NPF conference Godt tenkt! in Oslo
26th of October
When I started to study geology almost 20 years ago, my time scale changed on the first day from tens of thousands of years to 540 million years, and then to 4 billion years.
I'm telling you this because I'd like to introduce you a little more to the explorer's mind set
... because perspectives are important to this story ...
INTRODUCTION
Let me tell you about ExploCrowd: "Explo" comes from Exploration, the circle is a symbol of cooperation, and "Crowd" stands for crowd-sourcing = we are looking for oil based on crowd-sourcing.
ExploCrowd is the first company with this business model in the traditional oil industry in Norway, but we anticipate that this way of working will be much more normalized in the future.
The company is primarily about culture, diversity in age and experience, freedom and passion for geology.
I would like to share some of the experiences I have gained over the last year in which ExploCrowd has existed, and tell you about some of the reflections I've made - all of which largely underpin our way of working together.
The basic idea behind the company was that with all the dismissals of explorers in the oil industry, and the general trend of increased amount of time spent on PowerPoint presentations and management systems, there is actually little time left to look for oil and develop new exploration concepts, even if you have really good people available.
And this is where the geologists perspective comes in. As I mentioned, the geologists world view spans a wide range, from plate tectonics, to mountain range scale and to microscopic scale when looking at reservoirs in detail. For instance Greenland rotated clockwise some million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean opened in the south and Greenland collided with Svalbard in the north to generate a whole new mountain range, which probably continued down south and most likely had an impact on the outcome of the recent Koigen well.
This requires spacious understanding and creative thinking to imagine how the world and geology have changed over millions of years. In many ways, geology is a very creative field.
And then try to put a geologist in front of an Excel Spreadsheet. Does Not Compute. The engineers and finance people are much better at that. We geologists tell stories about the past, and creativity thrives better without boundaries and a flat organisation structure.
BUSINESS MODEL
With this business model, we want to take exploration geologists out of the sometimes limiting framework of the oil companies, free them from strategies and known truths, to facilitate exploration geologists so that they can use their experiences, collaborate and use their full potential. We believe that freedom and passion are the key to bring out the talent in people. Hence, my leadership consists of seeing people and facilitate that they can work on what they would like to do, which is often what they do best. And we want this DISKOS database to live! We might not have all the latest data available, but the data available has proven to be good enough to deliver high quality studies when combined with today's technology.
PRACTICAL
We are funded with NOK 2 million from investors and have a main base in Stavanger. But in reality, it does not matter where in the world we are based, because we use a system where we share the knowledge and data in the cloud, and it makes collaboration easy.
HERE IS THE TEAM
We are organized such that we have a Core Team at the office in Stavanger. They support the experts and do a large part of the regional interpretations.
Jostein is a GIS expert and creates beautiful and intelligent maps for us, Stine helps us in a few months of seismic interpretation and structural geology, Gustavo and Sveinung interpret seismic, fix data, seismic well ties and such things while Anastasiia interprets seismic and draws the most beautiful illustrations to communicate our science. As a leader, of course, I did not put myself in the middle, it would have been completely wrong.
The Core Team (first circle) are paid for their work, but they work when they want to work. With us there is full flexibility and you can take as much holiday as you like. With salary. It fits perfectly if you want to give what it takes towards a project deadline, but also have valuable time with the family when it is convenient. And then it is also very convenient with this arrangement when Anastasiia's Christmas in Russia is celebrated at a different time than here in Norway.
The next circle is Prospect Hunters, Associates and Exploration Advisors who are more loosely connected with us and work with us when it suits their plans. It's Petter on Petrophysics, Mark Rowan who is a world-renowned structural geologist specializing in salt tectonics, Andrew Thurlow (ex-Ichron) is one of the most skilled sedimentologists I know, and it is a pleasure to work with a man with his intellect. Richard Pegrum is 76 years now and has been all the way since the oil adventure began. He among others helped find the Troll field. Amel is Iraqi and physicist, and has helped to develop the Petroleum Authorities and Legislation in Iraq, Torbjørn Throndsen has decades of experience with petroleum systems in Norway, Jon Gutmanis is an expert in fractured carbonates, Marianne Skibeli and Daniel Stoddard are with us, but are currently working on other projects - and Tore Svånå is, in principle, retired but not finished working on geology and exploration. He is with us from Harstad.
Mark Rowan and I have had Skype sessions every Saturday over the summer, where we have made significant progress on the understanding of the architecture of the Barents Sea every time. He has not really worked with anyone before, but he is totally impressed with what the young people are achieving and he wants to find new projects to work with. And the younger geologists just can’t believe that they get to work with a man like him … sometimes they sit down together and they get the seismic interpretation right and he get’s it wrong – can you believe what that must feel like for them?!
The last circle is our strategic collaboration partners. Here it is about synergy effects and that you can achieve a competitive advantage by working together. Echo Geo is a London-based team specializing in geophysics, and for instance Sarka has been visiting to help and teach the Core Team about Seismic Well Tie. Estimages already has high-quality depth conversion models, but they can use our maps to fine tune their models. We also collaborate with DUG Insight as an alternative to Petrel simply because it is good and efficient. We are also working with drilling engineers to see if we can find ways to drill cheaper and more efficient wells, but we are just at the test phase at this stage.
These strategic collaborations mean that we can move forward fast.
Gustavo and Tore in London
Gustavo here is a bright Brazilian who is relatively early in his career. This doesn’t hold him back, though. Tore Svånå has written many publications and been part of drilling many of the wells in the Barents Sea. Gustavo was in the process of learning GeoTeric and worked on visualizing reef structures in the Barents Sea and we linked him up with Tore. It was great to observe them as they worked together. One of the results was that Gustavo was able to give Tore some answers to something he had wondered about for 15 years. At the same time, it was also very valuable for Gustavo to be able to connect to Tore's long experience and learn a lot from him all the time. We ended up sending them to London together to present their findings. There was a lot of learning in that part.
We have weekly online Team Meetings, where we keep each other updated on ongoing regional projects and business opportunities. Often there are 15 people invited to the meeting, depending on people's availability at the time. At these meetings we will talk about EVERYTHING including the business development side.
Communication is very important for the way we work and for people to feel involved. At the same time, it's also smart to share the knowledge because you do not have a single business development manager, but 15 people who are actively looking for opportunities. At the same time, transparency is also an important factor, for instance that everyone knows exactly how much everyone gets paid in salary - which is easy, because we all get paid the same amount.
The way to work has high demands on the integrity of the people, and it is a prerequisite that we can trust people to handle confidential information in a good and proper way.
As you can see, we have a relative international team and it is amazing with such a composition when you trust each other. In fact, we are practically discussing global politics and religion every day, and I am constantly learning something new. But it is not only me; there are a few who gets their understanding of the world challenges and open their eyes to how things can also be out there in the big world.
The secret is of course a flat structure, where everyone is seen and listened to.
THE WAY OF WORKING AND THE RESULTS
We have just finished a big regional job for an international client, which I unfortunately can not tell who is. We were 16 people who worked intensively over several months to deliver the project. It was a very good experience, and it accelerated the making of the company culture.
When I look back at the project, I think in particular of an experience that makes me glad:
It is in the spring, the last night before the deadline on our first part of the project delivery. It's quite late and people are still working intensely to deliver. But it's not a stressful mood, it's adrenaline, helping each other out, laughter, smile and pride.
A team feeling and almost a feeling of happiness. Everyone works together towards a common result, everyone has given their best and really tries to make this feeling of flow last. In the middle of the night we were still seven people in the office, and I tried to get people to go home because we were really finished, but I just had to give up. This was the experience of flow. It is something we work with consciously, as a goal, as an inner motivation. And it works great!
In the second phase of the project, there was a very high degree of cooperation between the client team and our team so that they got exactly what they needed. There was also a high degree of knowledge transfer, which is one of our priorities. The satisfaction in delivering something that was exactly what the client team needed, that means something.
That makes the entire ExploCrowd team grow.
... and then you can think that these are relatively soft values and sound very nice, but what I see happen is that because each team member takes ownership of the product and has a sense of responsibility for each other in the team, they deliver all their absolute best. And when you have a whole team of experts and talents who work well together and deliver the best they can, we have a High Performance Team that can deliver at extremely high speed and high quality:
Since New Year, in a short period of time, we have worked up three major regional studies covering vast parts of the Barents Sea. A lot of basic research work has been completed and is ongoing, and scientific publications are now waiting to be written - for those who want to do so.
These regional studies will now provide the framework for the 10 prospects we have found in Barents so far, out of which one structure is similar size to the Korpfjell dome.
We have demonstrated that there is a possibility to find oil in the western part of the Barents Sea, an area which has been a disappointment for almost four decades, with dry wells and gas discoveries - but we have good explanations for this.
We have proposals to move a couple of the major structural elements and invented new ones, updated existing exploration models and found new ones.
And through collaboration between talent and experts, we have understood Maud Basin secrets in detail and now look at how we can use it in practice in the further exploration of prospects.
... and then whe have actually created paid work for 19 people since New Year.
And now we are done in the Barents Sea, and we move south in search of new opportunities, new ideas, new collaborations and new synergies.
Brage challenged me to reflect about the ExploCrowd way of working can be transferred to other disciplines and industries - the answer is obviously a resounding yes.
Whether it's engineers, drilling engineers, nurses, teachers or opera singers - it's suitable for anyone with professional call or passion. I am fully convinced that it is through this kind of leadership that you get the best out of professional specialists, and that this will be one of the ways we will work in the future knowledge society.
Of course, I have a lot more to say than what's possible in 10-15 minutes, so if there's anything you're curious about, you are most welcome to come and talk to me afterwards.
Sidsel Lindsø at the Lundin // NPF Conference Godt Tenkt!
26th of October 2017