Episode 3.17: Oil Change
THE PODCAST: May 25, 2021
ON CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR CHANGE & EQUITY
Change is on everywhere! This week we hear from Matt Hall, Founder and CEO of Agile Geoscience. He talks about changes they are leading in the energy sector and we get to compare notes from our work. Join us for an engaging, provocative and fun dialogue where worlds collide!
Together, Tim Merry and Tuesday Ryan-Hart are THE OUTSIDE—systems change and equity strategists who bring the fresh air necessary to organize movements, organizations, and collaborators forward for progress, surfacing new mindsets for greater participation and shared impact.
3.17 — SHOW NOTES
Tim: We are very excited to have Matt Hall with us today. Matt Hall is the CEO and Founder of an organization called Agile*. He's also been involved in launching a global network called the software underground. Today, we get to hear a little bit of his story and the changes that are taking place in the world of subsoil geoscience. We get to hear how some of the questions you've heard us in, over the last three seasons, are also embedded in worlds, which seems as distant from us, as geophysics. Join us.
Tim: Matt has a PhD in sedimentology, 20 something years experience in the energy industry, worked for Statoil (now Equinor), Landmark and ConocoPhillips as a geophysics advisor, has written a bunch of books and papers and articles and conference papers and book chapters and edited books and all kinds of stuff. But now you are the CEO and Founder of an organization called Agile, which sounds like - just in a word - like the direct contradiction of those large organizations.
Matt Hall: I'd been, like you say around a corporate environment for quite a while after university; in some pretty big companies. Landmark is actually part of Halliburton, so it's a ginormous company with hundreds of 1000s of employees. I definitely did feel some friction with those organizations, especially at Halliburton, which is a sales driven organization and sales driven organizations have things quotas, and you must meet your quotas. If you don't, things start to go down, people get fired, people miss their bonuses and become really unhappy and annoyed. I felt like I was in a lot of meetings with sales and marketing people where they were asking questions like, “how can we make our customers think we're more awesome?” And that's basically what it boiled down to; that’s what marketing is right now. And my position was, well, “we could try being really awesome?” But that's a really difficult thing for people to get their heads around because it involves risk and feeling exposed and doing things that aren't really in the manual, marketing school, or whatever. That always seems super obvious to me. And so that’s how I ended up leaving that company. Again, not particularly unhappy, I just did not want to do that anymore. I was getting pulled more and more into that side of things and enjoying it kind of less and less. So I stepped back into ConocoPhillips, which is an oil and gas company based in Calgary [Alberta, Canada] which is an amazing place for a geologist.
Tues: I actually wanted to ask you why you got into what you're doing? I wanted to ask you a very naive question like, what's your favourite rock? or What do you care about, like underneath the earth or something? There's some reason you got into what you're doing… and then when you say Calgary is like the best place to be, I'm like, What? What is it? What draws you?
Matt Hall: I was very fortunate to go on a family holiday with a brilliant volcanologist, as a 16-year old, when I was trying to figure out what my next steps in life might look like. He was a professor at the University of Cambridge. We went to this amazing, beautiful part of Scotland in the Inner Hebrides, to an island called Rum, which is an exposed, 65-million year old volcano, that's been completely unroofed. You can see the magma chamber, you can walk around the hills of Rum, and you are climbing up through the magma chamber of a volcano. It's got some unique properties that make it really interesting, sort of globally, because it's got layers in it. And what's incredible, is that those layers contain sedimentary structures that you might get in a sand dune, or in a ripples on the bottom of a river, because there are currents inside the magma chamber and the crystals in the molten rock act exactly like sand grains do in a river. That blew my mind. I’d never thought about stuff like that. We didn't do any geology at school. That was the first time I thought about this sort of dynamic Earth stretching back in time through millions and millions of years and how you could hold them, literally hold a magnifying glass up to it, and learn about stuff that had happened three kilometers under the surface millions of years ago. I loved that combination of chemistry, physics, the outdoors, geography and geomorphology. So that's what got me into it.
Matt Hall: Most geologists in the world, are employed in the petroleum industry. If you're not in academia, you're probably in petroleum. And if you're not in petroleum, you're in the minority of mining, water, geothermal, and other things like that. So it was pretty normal for people to go into petroleum. And then of course, your mind gets blown on a daily basis by data. It's like the Hubble Space Telescope, kind of thing. You point it down, instead of up. But with things like seismic data, we can see through the earth 10, 20, 30 kilometers and the pictures are incredible. You can see landscapes, rivers, coastal rocks, volcanoes. And, if you're lucky enough to be involved in acquiring that data, you're the first person to see those landscapes. You're the first human being to see a landscape from 300 million years ago with large scale features, of course, but things like rivers and seas. It's pretty cool!
Matt Hall: In the early 90s, people were aware of the greenhouse effect and the fact that hydrocarbons are full of carbon and that burning them produces a lot of carbon dioxide. But I think we were at the tail end of the sort of prevailing view of the 70s and 80s, which was that drilling oil wells was like going to the moon; it was an incredible achievement. It was an engineering feat. It was a marvel. And, look at all of the wealth we can produce with it. My first job was in Norway, and the wealth there is palpable. Norway went from being a giant fishing village, to being this kind of technologically advanced, ultra first world country on the basis of the social impact that it recognized immediately, petroleum would have on its country if it did it well, which it did. Oil is so valuable, that the most punitive, awful business terms are still worth it. Unfortunately, most countries never really realized this and so Norway goes around the world now advising countries on how to get more out of a resource like that.
Matt Hall: And for now, anyway, we seem to need at least some hydrocarbon in the energy system in order to function because that's the world. That's the society we've built. But there's definitely a new thing really, clearly, in the petroleum industry, is that it has to die and it has to die as soon as possible, without the massive impact that it would have if it shutdown tomorrow. So what does that look like? And how do we do that in a humane and equitable way?
Tues: Would you mind talking more about that? It might be obvious to you that that's the conversation in the petroleum industry, but I don't know that it's obvious outside of it. So I'd love to hear, just because you're in it, what you know, and what you understand, from your perspective.
Tim: And just to build on that, Tues, we talk about hospicing in our work. So when we're looking at major systems change, we're looking at not just how do you create the conditions for fundamentally trailblazing people, and initiatives, to flourish but we're also looking at how do we enable things that are no longer working, no longer fulfilling purpose - whether that be policies or people or institutions - how do we actually help them die well / die with some kind of dignity, because if you don't help them die with dignity, they are incredibly toxic as they fall. And that toxicity will bleed into whatever the new things are that we're creating. So it’s as much part of our world and work to help these systems and structures and institutions and ways of acting, die with dignity, as it is about creating the conditions for trailblazers, which Agile has become. Agile is, without a doubt, a trailblazer in your sector but you're also pointing at the dying. Those two things happen simultaneously. It's not like we get to sequence them nicely, and say, okay, that one's gonna die, and then we're gonna go launch some new things. They both happen at the same time.
Matt Hall: Geologists are environmentally sensitive people. That's what you want is people with a high sense of responsibility and ethical core, to be the ones who are exploiting resources that we need from the Earth. And, I think a lot of subsurface scientists probably do feel some guilt at working in petroleum nowadays, because it's getting more and more uncomfortable, notwithstanding all the things I said about it still being a necessity. What’s also interesting is that a lot of the machinery of petroleum extraction is now sort of slowly turning towards more sustainable energy sources. The least awesome of which is shale gas, which is this essentially new way of looking at petroleum where instead of looking for reservoirs full of porosity, you're looking for rocks that you can put porosity in by breaking them with hydraulic pressure, and they will just produce gas and in some cases, light oil liquids. So it turns out these rocks are everywhere. So all the stuff we've been doing basically as petroleum explorationists, turns out not to have really been necessary, you can actually pretty much drill a well anyway you like, into an organic shale, squeeze a lot of water into it until it breaks and then produce gas. So this has revolutionized the petroleum industry, resulted in a complete change in the economics of petroleum, a lot of people losing their jobs, because you just don't need that many people to do work like that. But it's the beginning of a sort of transition. And gas is better than oil. It's almost entirely put the oil sands of Alberta out of business.
Matt Hall: After my experience of seeing how Norway operates, I'd like to see governments get much stronger on regulating the industry. Force the oil and gas industry to adopt the behaviors that we want to see them adopt as a society.
Tim: It's taken me a while in my work, because, as you know, a lot of our work was rooted in building participation, building momentum, getting people talking to each other, out of people talking to each other we're going to discover new solutions, we then need to put infrastructure behind those solutions to really drive and accelerate their application, and we need to connect to the people who are generating those new solutions to each other. So it becomes more of a movement rather than exhausted isolated actors. That's a lot of the theory of change that I think the likes of Tues and I have been working with, within large systems or across geographical regions, for the last 20 years, and it's only really in the last five, six years, that I've just been, like, that's insufficient. We actually need full on legislation to accompany this. People need to be told to put on their seatbelts, and they need to be told to not smoke in the car with their children. The bottom up groundswell, highly participatory movement building has to be accompanied by changes in law, changes in policy, and you need to embed that within these very large strategies for change. You just can't do it without it.
Tues: I think that that's exactly right. And I think for me, I think about it as often these groundswells, the grassroots, the insistence on change is what almost forces the legislation. I think sometimes we have a leader who just has a moral compass, that can move things. Hierarchy isn't necessarily a bad thing. We needed Lyndon Johnson to say we're going to have a civil rights voting act of 1968. The majority of Americans did not want that, so sometimes it is a leader just having a moral compass, but more often there was pressure on him for years from the grassroots to do those things. So they're not kind of two separate, they're really deeply intertwined. And I think that we could see some legislation from what you were saying Matt because the eyes are there, like now we're all looking, now we're all panicking and saying, what are we going to do? We're destroying things here, something must change. And so I think in some ways, the grassroots can drive legislation. And legislation can change behavior more quickly, often, than any kind of citizen engagement. So it's like a real reciprocal relationship.
Matt Hall: You want the policy to be informed by reality. And if you don't have those conversations at the grassroots, you don't know what that reality looks like. I think one of the things that eventually drove me to leave the classical industry, and my corporate desk behind in Calgary, was the desire to have more freedom in conversation. It was social media that made me realize that I could have that, that those conversations could still happen, even though I wasn't in a place like Calgary, and wasn't surrounded by dozens of amazing, super bright, motivated scientists and engineers all day long. It was the fact that in the late 2000s, I started to realize that, oh, wow, you know, you can actually have a blog and reach 1000s of people that way, it can be a technical, highly esoteric blog, you can be on Twitter and follow other scientists and engineers and be part of that community. And the other big thing that I kind of involve myself in is the digital realm and what's happening with computers and data driven decisions and AI and that kind of thing.
Tim: And then you started Agile. There's this great line on your website that reads “We're scientists. We know data. We know analytics. We know tech. If you're trying to do something no one has done before we can help.” I was really struck by that as the kind of front end mission of your organization and of what you and your crew have started. And of course, software underground has been born out of that. And I want to make sure we get to software underground, because I think it's really exciting. And I think the questions you've been engaging with around equity, as it relates to the software underground, are going to be really interesting for our listeners.
Matt Hall: There’s only five of us in Agile, we're very small company, we've always been small. And growth has not been something we've sort of pursued. I want to get my hands dirty all day. That's all I want to do is make new things and do geology and geophysics. Our specialty is in proof of concept prototype - like I don't know what this needs to be but let's just try some things. And that goes for sort of computer technology; we write code for people to help solve problems. But it also goes for the sort of human technology side of things as well; especially around building communities of practice. A lot of technical organizations suffer from a kind of extended ivory tower syndrome, where they name experts, and, of course, what you immediately do is you say to that person, you can never be wrong, which is a horrible, dangerous thing to say to a person - that shuts them down in many ways, unfortunately, but also makes them rather bullish on a lot of things. And it says to the rest of the organization, you're not really entitled to opinion on this thing. So it has two horrible consequences. And it's all over technical organizations in the name of excellence, right? A lot of it comes down to experts thinking that they need to know the answer to everything. And they're automatically sort of skeptical of grass roots knowledge. And knowledge networks really expose a lot of that.
Matt Hall: Software underground started off as a little Google group of enthusiasts of people I invited who came to some early events that I ran in the community to try to start conversations. Eventually, we moved to Slack about six years ago. And now I think we've got about 3600 people in that Slack. And, it's this amazing global - I almost want to say movement - that is relentlessly kind of forward looking and motivated by really nothing other than doing interesting and useful things. It's one of my favorite kind of things in my professional life, you know, looking through even my whole career, I'm probably proudest of that, that that exists and I have been a big part of it.
Tues & Tim: So when you say doing things that are useful, can you give me a sense of what are software undergrounders up to today? And who are they? You and I had a bunch of conversations around equity as it related to software underground and the board as well. So not only what you're up to, but like, the deliberateness with which you're forming the relationships to do those things, I think has been one of the things that's inspired me about following a little bit of your journey there.
Matt Hall: I hang out with you enough, Tim, to have this phrase, “creating the conditions” burned into my mind. I think about it a lot. I think about making an environment where the right things can happen and good things can happen. You can't necessarily make those right things or good things happen.
Matt Hall: We [software underground] started off as a group of enthusiasts and many of the people who came to our early events looked like me. A lot of guys into computers and science, they go to a lot of conferences, they write a lot of papers, they like giving talks, they like being on panels, they like having blogs, and telling everyone what's what. And so when you organize events, they come to them. And if you offer spots to talk at a conference, they take them, you don't have to ask twice. And in fact, you’re probably inundated with offers from these individuals. Thank goodness. It's amazing. They want to give stuff away. One of our big things in software underground is that everything is open source / open access. It’s free to access. It's all about getting science into people's hands. But we've reached a bit of a crescendo, I suppose of where that leads. Two years ago, we had our first conference. We went to France and rented this amazing Chateau, like a 16th century beautiful Chateau. It’s an amazing bubble of awesomeness in Normandy and we ate beautiful food and drank wine and hung out talking about geology and geophysics. And, it was great, but we were talking about building accessible communities that aren't gate kept and secret clubs that aren't elitist. And as we were sipping on champagne in the Chateau in Normandy we realized that we might have become something we did not intend to become. It was a real epiphany as an organization.
Matt Hall: Then COVID hit and everything got cancelled and we organized this free online thing. And the online thing was THE thing. It was the thing we had been looking for. It was the thing that 700 people came to from all over the world… and everyone looked different. This is what we want to be and do more of.
Tues: What is the conversation now with this group of people? Is there a conversation around equity or is it in the action?
Matt Hall: It is not in the action yet. Whatever happens next does not seem, to me, to be happening by itself. While the community now is much richer, and we’ve built a much more diverse board, there is still lots of things that have to happen to create the platform that people can jump into opportunities to amplify, connect, and produce outputs. It’s not as accessible as it could be. The thing that needs to happen next is around permission.
Tim: We often say that people trust invitation from people like them. So that deliberate strategy of looking at the DNA is a really strong first step.
Song: “Mirror in the bathroom,” by The English Beat
Poem: “Past Perfection” by John Hegley
You used to be my cup of tea, but now you’re not so hot
You couldn’t see enough of me, but now you see the lot
You used to be a mystery, but now it’s only us
Once you were my cup of tea, but now you’re more like puss.
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Duration: 50:
Produced by: Mark Coffin
Theme music: Gary Blakemore
Episode cover image: source