Identity Crisis?

Successful Strategies for Mitigating the Effect of Boom and Bust

I am presenting on the 28th of September, and discussing as part of an SPE panel at the 2016 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Dubai on the abovementioned topic and as I prepare, I thought I might share the thoughts I have in reflection before I speak in this area.

I will title my brief introduction by posing a question to the crowd as follows:

“Identity Crisis?”

Imagine with me that you are in Scotland, a newly married twentysomething, with a one-year-old child. You had somehow convinced your Californian Bride to pack up and move back to where you grew up and feel at home.  Your career in Architecture that you studied for has not been turning out to be all that you dreamed it might be, and you are struggling to find work, let alone a safe and steady place to live. You begin to question everything that you were told, and everyone that told you it, you are losing faith in this world, and the easy-life you have been sold.  You had fallen for the formula.  Work hard, go through college, find a career, find a lifelong partner, have children... All of this seemed to have been thrown out in a few big decisions, now everyone is looking at the source of your problem, it must be you. Things are looking grim.  This is a real downturn people.   

During a social setting one weekend you meet a clean cut American oilman who seems to want to engage with you all night!  Why he wants to talk to this curious Scotsman who married a Californian girl and pulled her from the lap of luxury and stable safety to this separation and squalor!  You start to realize that your views on culture and doing business in Scotland seem to offer up new insights and intriguing revelations.  Days after the chance meeting, he calls and offers an interview with a drilling equipment repair facility, an hour south of your home town - something that would be far outside of any normal commute for this small country.  You humor him, as you are looking for work, and mostly concerned about caring for your family, so for now, anything will do.  You give his sunny world view a head nod but you want to appreciate the enthusiasm and walk on by, manage the healthy level of realism that is required when listening to an American super-charged positive perspective.

He had been quite excited describing this small equipment company, which had developed an invention that was changing the drilling industry, he called it called a top drive and would pause, like I may have heard of such a thing.  At the time all you hear is "good pay, but long drive" and in your head, you think "why on earth would this man want me, with absolutely no experience in this arena, they must be desperate, perhaps Montrose has ran out of workers."  Thinking back to the summer work you have done in oil companies really made this career path seem of little interest. It appeared, during your limited exposure, that they were only about money with a deep sense of misery and drudgery, void of satisfaction at work, and you had left that option as a career by the roadside many years back.  You have to also face a stark truth, that a career in designing and building a better world in architecture was also not working for you! 

What was interesting was the theme of enquiry,  as your final college thesis was on the construction of London being executed by American companies and the challenges of British institution.  Somehow, this man was relating that to fixing American drilling machines in Montrose.  His passionate story of how these giant powerful drilling machines are converted from a beaten state back into factory delivered condition – rejuvenated, pristine, and able to return to the tough work of the North Sea - sounded strangely interesting and even somewhat exciting.  Most of all, all you want is money, and everyone knows oil and gas has that.  It was a desperate time and you have ran out of options.

You give the interview a go, taking the seemingly never-ending drive South to see what this is.  You find two small repair shops appear through a fog of drizzling rain, in an Industrial Estate just outside of Montrose.  This is a foreign town to you.  Different dialect.  No grey granite.  Nothing but vague connections in your head.  Road-signs when hitch-hiking to college. A regular pattern of childhood, driving on the weekends through Montrose and Arbroath, on your way to see family in Edinburgh before the dual carriageway, and after that you never saw these small coastal towns again. 

Each interview was different to past experiences, from paper rounds, to football stadium, to early architects in Scotland and then California.  This really seemed to be different.  The tone.  The connectedness to the objects that were the business.  Interruptions from your ADD brain (we would call that a creative mind before it became an illness,) as you see a similar object on every desk.   Apparently this is an  Apple Mac "personal (a word never used before this moment) computers" on their desks.  What you have to understand is that your computer exposure at this point was one, slow, shared, green screen machine at work, and in college you were asked to write your own code to build programs.  There is a sense of hope during the interviews you have never seen in interactions with oil and gas companies, let alone Scottish business.  Still, the main reason is money, no one would drive two hours every day for a job.  You accept the idea temporarily and plan to take the job if offered while looking for an Aberdeen job within a month or so. 

The call comes and the day arrives: you are led into a small, greasy, low lit shed in the corner of a dark, dirty workshop. You feel hopeful but quickly swallow all that hope in one deep gulp, as the distance from everything you ever new and this place become clear.  Everyone looks at you with side glances of distain.  They see it.  They smell it.  You are from another town and you do not belong here.  The next thing you become aware of is the pungent smell in the air.  It is mixture of heavy oil and some sort of blue grease removal gel that becomes part of the transition hand rubbing ritual from shop floor to your cramped shed.  Two tiny old desks and barely room for two dejected office chairs with a flickering strip light that seemed to be sucking the life from your brains all day.  It made you want to walk the shop and the yard, which I often did.   This place will come to be a smell and an environment that will seep in under your skin and begin to feel like home to you over the next few years. 

You are handed an A4 sheet of paper (this is the European equivalent of the standard American 8-1/2 x 11” sheet paper) crammed with the names of the genius inventor engineers who constantly worked to develop, improve, and support the amazing elephant-sized yellow machines being disassembled around the shop.

As you might imagine, this was a new day for me, and the beginning of an adventure I never would have believed was ahead.  At first, all I felt like was an imposter, but was excited by everything around me, as it was so new and different. There were a handful of selfless people who met my inquisitive mind with endless answers.  They took the role that my kind Geordie grandfather had left behind, an empty and missed legacy in my life.  They engaged, trained, molded and helped me all the time, and it really made the difference. Thanks will always be due to people who were giants in those days, Gordon Robertson, Neil Herst, George Sangster and Mike Williams, the wisdom and experience that fell of the table of daily discussion really left my hunger for more unsatisfied and propelled me forwards.  I became an active contributory member of the modern drilling business in those years, only because of the development and training, that have made a lifelong impact to me.  This theme never ended until I became the trainer and the tradition goes on.

This simple A4 list, not became my safety net, but it became a central theme in my life in these years.  It was a literal “phone-a-friend” list of insightful and impressive experts, who would often be confused and question the reality of the world we experienced in the field.  They would regularly defy my eyes explaining how the physics of what I would tell them could not be.  We were seeing broken parts and twisted steel that had to be communicated in words, through a phone line.  Those interchanges gave me a depth of intimacy with machines that could not be explained, but it was a shared language we all passionately conversed in.  Every afternoon, as Orange County, California opened early to allow the engineers to avoid the morning traffic as best they could, I would pull out my list and make calls on the cream coloured (colored) shiny new touch-tone phone that stood out, along side, what was now my very own new Apple Mac SE personal computer.  The two bright plastic tools of my new trade stood out in an office that was daily covered in the fingerprints from all the grease covered hands of our small workshop crew, as they would grab and search with us, to gain insight and guidance from the many manuals that surrounded my desk, that would save our lives daily.   The distant voices from across the pond always sounded like they were far removed from the reality we dealt with every day. We lived in a panicked drilling machine ER, with concerned relatives pushing for the return of these critical machines.  The disassociated calm tones of our pondering engineers voices reminded me often of many a sun-kissed American movie. I often imagined a beach out their windows with palm trees, their tan faces smiling in an oasis far from our frontier reality with their over-confident white toothed smiles Miami Vice-like pastel t-shirts. 

It all drew me in, this frontline workshop we experienced. It was a life that would often come home with you and your "portable" computer, and rudely interrupt your sleep, with desperate, foul language calls in the middle of the night.  The family learned the rules the hard way, "only Dad pick's up the phone in the middle of the night!" 

It felt like we were doing something valuable and important. 

Every step had new insights and learning in it about the use and abuse of drilling machinery, which was only confirmed when I got to go, right in to the middle of the apparent war zone, where the action really was, offshore drilling rigs.  This final step on to these gigantic black structures, remote, stark and exposed battlefields of  working drilling rig islands of steel, was what did it for me.  I was hooked.  Very quickly, my lifelong rig and machinery obsession began.

Things were getting better. 

The feeling of connection was also balanced with another looming silent emerging and concerning reality.  It was a loss of light in our darkening days, clouds of downturn were daily building and forming over us.  It was an eerily familiar sense in in my young life and a very real parallel to the setting of a small costal town in Scotland before inbounding, pummeling North Sea rain came our way.  The A4 white pinned phone list on my wall did not last too long.  My boss started what felt like a weekly ritual, effortlessly handing me bad news in a fresh printed copy of who we can call in California.  A new list.  A new list.  A new list.  Less people, less people, less people.  Their TV tone went from open and sunny, to reserved and restrained.  You could feel it in the mood of our small corner cabin.  Now this became a new depth to a downturn for me, but this time I felt silently less alone. 

My seedling of hope was now being stamped on by a dirty, heavy, steel toed, seven hole, Dr, Marten boot.  As word got around Jim, the fitter, who had been with the company since the beginning, passed me by in the workshop and prepared me for bad news.  After smiling a dark knowing smile with pity in his eyes, he chirped words that seemed to somehow comfort him and yet chilled me...

“Last in, first out!”  

He must know something I didn't!

It wasn't hard to hear a long story in a few short words. 

Although I had been down the road of disappointment before, I was not ready for this!  I couldn't tell my wife.  How much could she take?

Confusion was confined to my head.  I was just starting to belong. 

It all sent shivers down my spine.  All I could see was my now pregnant wife and daughter up in Aberdeen, in our freshly decorated council flat, finally feeling like we might be OK.  Things seemed to be finally going well, and now another blow was apparently coming. 

I had been getting used to these blows in life. This time however, something felt different to me. I really felt like there was a remaining glimmer of hope, I quietly harbored a secret thought. That Jim, who had been trustworthy in experience and guidance, often very right, might still be wrong this time.  I felt like I had something I could offer to this place. I felt I was starting to make changes and contribute to the productivity and value we were generating in our small workshop.  Surely this was not just another let down for me? Part of a confusing chapter of my "lost identity" in life lessons. Could this really be, another problem looking me in the eye and telling me I once again was at another dead end, in a never ending complex maze. 

“What do you do with these feelings?” I thought to myself. 

Suddenly, we were running around with a new frantic intensity, all keeping our heads down, whispering, pointing, covering our deep seeded fears, and every day wondering deep inside, is it today?  To this day, nobody talked about it among us.  My world had been changed before, and it looked like it was going to change again, but something in me really wanted that not to be so.  

One afternoon, out of the corner of my eye I was aware of a figure standing in the doorway.  I turned from the words on my small computer screen, expecting red coveralls and a request for the next job, and saw a different figure.  A  crisp clean shirt, white hair, bearded man with a well worn leathery face was smiling with what I thought were bright gleaming teeth bearing at me, silent.  Time and memory may have embellished this image in my mind's eye, looking like an oilfield mix of John Wayne and Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken!  He waved a short wave, which seemed odd and very different, as he simply boomed the words “Hi!”  American, I said in my mind as I was stunned by the awkward moment.  No words came out of my mouth, and he walked on.  It was a moment that struck me, as he had a look in his eye.  A knowing look.  It seemed different to anything I had seen before.  Now curious, I asked around to find out who this person was, and learned it was none other than Benni Reinhold, the “R in Varco” as they would call him.  A legend, whatever that meant.  I learned we were going to have everyone get together in the workshop to hear this man speak.  “Here we go,” they would say. “The American rah-rah speech!”  I wasn’t sure what that was, but I had to go, so I was going to find out.

This man spoke words that were not expected.  Words of hope.  I felt like I had been watching a bunch of dead fish flowing down a stream, and then suddenly, today, one fish was pushing through, thrashing with tenacity up the stream and against the flow.  He talked with enthusiasm about us; the people in the shop and around the company.  “We do this to have a better life,” he proclaimed.  The natural sceptic inside of me, that comes from a life growing up in a country with very deep historic roots and had recently birthed punk rock, made me question all authority.  “How so?  The A4 list of real voices that I had become familiar with on my office wall was shrinking, and we were letting people go from the shop floor, perhaps I was a "short timer", how could it be so?”  With every word he kept pushing against the flow of dead fish in my mind.  “We are experiencing a down turn, but we will push through and make this work for all the hard working people we have left."  He somehow honored those we had to let go using words like "dignity" and "respect" and took us through the harsh realities.  He went on with "We will forge on and keep inventing and reinventing our way through this, like soldiers in battle driving towards a goal that will continue, in a tradition that is our heritage in this company, and make sure this a great place to work, with more opportunity for more people to bring great new ideas to our industry.”  He may have seemed to be out of touch to some, but to me, in that single moment, I got it.  I was in. 

There was a wild sense of destiny and purpose in his words that made me all of a sudden allow a change in my way of thinking.  This growing sense of impending doom that had become the popular norm was being challenged, I could see it in his defiant smile and glimmer of hope in his eyes.  He knew these were fighting words, and if there is anything fiery Gaelic blood knows, it is how to boil.  I became willing and driven in a new way, desiring to see this carnage that had come upon us clearly as something we couldn’t control, and it began to have meaning to us, it was our enemy, and we would not be defeated, it is something that we are compelled in our collective nature, to push against it.  He convinced us that day to be on his side.  Defiant to a darkness that would not win our hearts and minds.  Going with him was something I wanted to do, for us, towards a different reason, a better way. 

We have to understand this ancient thought in our tough times.  We fight for bigger things today in our industry.  For a better tomorrow. 

In Chinese writing the word Crisis has two visual elements.  One means Danger and the other opportunity.  This became our reality.

This is the identity crisis we may find ourselves in today, how can we see a different direction and drive towards a future that is more positive than today.  How to move through a dangerous sea of uncertainty and accept the challenge ahead as an important opportunity and adventure worth fighting for.  Not just planning to survive, but planning up.  Finding a path towards a different tomorrow, and to discovering tangible ways to get there with the right mindset, bringing others with us on an unmarked path.  Having that same knowing smile I experienced in Benni, and that true sense of hope in a time where it is countercultural, and difficult within what we are experiencing.  It is the look of someone with a sense of purpose.  A knowing.  Not having the full picture, or ignoring what we are going through, but having a sense of strength from being sure of an inevitable upswing. 

It was a long climb up from those days, and the terrain was tough, but the people I walked the path with all those 25 years ago are the ones I enjoy the most today.  We all remember the number of times we pulled through.  Times change, technology and cultures evolve and none are truly identical, but the story has the same familiar characteristics, and we should remember, those who helped us get our eyes off the floor in similar circumstance, and recall what helped us through.  Chin up.  Cheer up.  Find a way to look to a future horizon, plan up and fight for tomorrow.  It is time for us to be Benni Reinhold and keep our crews together, on the same side.

Understanding a deeper sense of who you are and what you can bring to the table is the key today, address the identity crisis in these time, and then communicate that same sense of direction, leading well in tough times, to do all the right things to get to a better place.   This is at the core of what to do, gathering our left over, under resourced teams and helping with hope and vision, to take on the challenge and serve well today for the tomorrow that will come.