Tomatoes and Fruit Salad

We're about to kick off an exercise internally with the goal of creating a paper for a major safety conference effectively by internally crowdsourcing.  We have a team of about 25 volunteers from across the various parts of Atkins Energy group, including power, nuclear and oil and gas, of every age group from graduate to 40 years of experience, and we're going to try use the talents and experience of this diverse group to examine what we have and haven't learned from Piper.

The Piper Alpha disaster happened 25 years ago in July, and was a real game-changer in the offshore industry, and in high hazard industries worldwide.  What we are trying to do is to examine whether the lessons of Piper have been learned, what we could do to increase that understanding, and how to make the lessons really be learned.  It all turns into a presentation and probably technical article to be delivered by Martin Grant, CEO of our energy division, in June here in Aberdeen.

It's interesting to me in a number of ways.  I guess in the first place, my entire career was affected by Piper, in that my first job in Aberdeen came as a direct result of the requirement to develop a safety case for offshore operations, and my subsequent career progression while not always directly in process safety, has always had a flavour of that in it somewhere.

The second is the assertion that the oil industry can be very insular in practice, and that we don't often look outside of our industry for greater understanding, or checking that we are in line with modern processes or approaches.  From a management of major accident hazard point of view, it could be argued that as we had the worst few disasters within our industry, Piper Alpha, Texas City, Macondo, we have little to learn from others.  I can't imagine that assertion holding up to much real scrutiny, however.

The final place I'm looking forward to learning here is how to actually produce such knowledge and understanding in a networked, globally distributed team.  We did some very interesting training in Poyry on global networks, and I've read a bit since then on them, but it'll be fun to see how the interactions, the project management, and the knowledge development work in a team spread all the way around the world. 

I'll come back to this over the next few months and see how it's going.  As a lack of spoiler alert, the output won't be shared until after the conference.

And as for the title of the post, the first person I heard of say this line was Brian O'Driscoll, Irish Captain before they won the Rugby Six Nations Grand-Slam, in reply to some detailed question.  "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is leaving it out of a fruit salad".  (And for wisdom, I also use "understanding")