This post is not about running or working out, well mostly its not.
JF came to town this week, all the way from France and we had drinks and dinner. We had not seen each other for 13 years and to me JF had not changed. Yes he shed some 18kg in 7 months after picking up cycling but he is still the joker, the professor, the sensitive and boisterous guy I knew. That’s a reference to a workout, done, so we are on point. We had both formulated chemical products for the oil and gas production fields and we had worked together on several occasions in the wild oil fields of South East Asia.
JF had left the oil & gas industry in the mid 2000’s but stayed in chemicals. I got out of oil and gas in 2015. So what do former oilmen talk about when they meet?
After asking after our families and present career, we spoke about, what else, the times we spent in the field, the friends we made, the jokes we played, the mistakes we made and swore to never make again, the technical problems we faced, some of which we solved and those that we didn’t solved, we tried to figure out again, the attraction and ills of the industry we left. All this we regaled ourselves with in a mood of celebration. Most importantly we spoke of life, management and leadership lessons we learned through what we experienced in the oil fields of the world.
One of our workstations
One story I want to relate here was told by JF several times before, which got a retelling this week.
JF had been on a product formulation campaign in an oilfield, lets just say its not in Singapore or France. To do our jobs, we had to obtain fresh crude samples from the wells. Most times, this involved excruciating long and uncomfortable journeys on boats through seas which are not always calm or driving through the jungles or desert. In this instance, JF and his crew had to drive some 5+ hours through a jungle to obtain the sample of crude.
To save time, JF had decided to prepare the test bottles so that the test could run while they were driving back from the well and be completed for reading when they arrive at the base lab. He had primed each bottle with the mixtures of base chemicals. These were injected in PPM amounts into the bottles and the bottles were labelled and capped. Bottles packed into several cases, cases packed into the 4×4 and off the team went. The team was comprised of JF, another formulator, lets call him PL and a local low level technician.
When they got to the well after some hours of slipping and sliding and slowly negotiating the closed terrain, they set about collecting crude samples and initiating the test. A production line was organised. The local technician’s job was to uncap the bottles and pass the uncapped bottle to PL, PL filled each of the bottles with crude directly from the well and passed the bottle to JF. JF would cap and shake the bottles, mixing the crude with the bases earlier primed into the bottles thus initiating the test. That was the plan anyway.
This production line had been going for a while and an entire case of primed bottles had been filled before JF looked up and saw that the local technician was uncapping the bottles and shaking them dry. That got JF and PL going ape. When asked why he did what he did, the local technician said that he saw that all the bottles had some moisture and he thought the moisture might effect the way the test will turn out. Little did he know that the moisture he noticed was was actually the test formula. In a way, he was right to think so. They had gone almost halfway through before realising something was terribly wrong. The test had to be redone and it took them longer to finish.
What went wrong was that JF did not communicate to all members of the team the test protocol. Everyone in the team must be aligned to and be informed about the goals, the entire process and finally the particular task of each team member. Each team member has to be entrusted and trusted. It did not happen in this case. Yes we laugh at the scene now when we retell the story but in realtime, it was certainly not a comfortable situation for everyone and the goal of the team was jeopardised. The team ended up doing more work and test was off schedule.
Happily though, the product that was eventually formulated, went to market rather successfully.
Lessons learned is that communication is key and even the lowliest cog in the wheel needs to be trusted and entrusted.