I have been reflecting this morning on it being exactly three months since we joined the DEKRA Insight group of businesses and the transition from being an owner managed SME to being part of a EUR2.3billion global organisation.
It has been refreshing how welcoming the DEKRA organisation has been and of course in both teams we have had to be open to new ideas, open to challenge on “the way we do things around here” and to make a success of our new joint endeavour we have had to be active in seeking out people in our respective organisations with whom we can collaborate.
Coincidentally, I have also been reading press releases like those in Energy Voice covering the Deloitte survey of collaboration in the North Sea with headlines like “Why Culture, Collaboration and Communication are crucial to the UKCS”.
In layman’s terms culture is “the way we do things around here”.
Drawing on our own positive experiences with DEKRA, it seems to me that the oil and gas industry needs to be more receptive to challenge on “the way we do things around here”, a challenge to our culture.
This takes leadership – I was shocked but I guess not surprised that in the Deloitte survey less than 10% of respondents said that leadership in their organisations regularly emphasised the importance of collaboration or included it in their business strategy.
Collaboration also takes people reaching out to other people, our industry in global terms is actually a relatively small one.
How many times in a hotel or in a bar or in an airport do we bump into an ex-colleague, a supplier, a customer?
Our industry is tightknit, the personal relationships are strong, at this level the trust should exist to collaborate.
I was wondering who will be the brave people that make contact with other brave people in supplier or customer organisations or, heaven forbid, in competitors and suggest they work together for the benefit of the industry.
I would like to think that this is what we are doing in DEKRA Insight and in Optimus, we are finding colleagues in other parts of the larger organisation and exploring ways we can work together.
It’s sometimes hard to realise you don’t have a monopoly on good ideas and at other times the personal relationships that become established make it easy to combine good ideas and build them into better ones.
By collaborating within DEKRA Insight and learning from the collective expertise of the legacy businesses we are beginning to see how we can maximise our ability to make a difference.
If we can scale this thinking up, the future of the North Sea is bright.