Why Human Error Still Dominates Offshore Incidents — And What to Do About It

Peter Brecht00:00

I guess to the other thing, I can cut anything out. Like I'm rambling right now. I'll cut this out. Do you want me to introduce you as Mike or Michael?

Mike00:08

Neither is good. Michael Fry is good.

Peter Brecht00:08

Either is good. All right. Okay. All right. So we'll go with

All right, perfect.

Peter Brecht00:21

Alright, welcome to the local. Go ahead. You're good, man. What's

Mike00:22

For me to do it? Sorry, I didn't know if you wanted me to say Michael Fry with Cork Ignition Global and this is local energy or do you want to it at the end and then splice it into the front? Cool. That works. Yeah.

Peter Brecht00:30

We'll do, we can do that at the end. Yeah, we'll do at the end. Just it'll warm us up, right? You got to get the vocal cords rolling. All right, perfect. All right. Welcome to local energy. My name is Peter Brecht. My co-host Wade Spear is busy today. He's got other things he's got to get handled. Actually got a drilling rig that he's working on right now, but, our guest today is Michael Fry at Core Kognition Global. And I am beyond excited to talk with Michael. I was introduced to him, I think three years ago.

Maybe even longer than that. And really he was my first, I think introduction to what someone with a voice in oil and gas can actually do. Someone that's excited about teaching others. So Michael, thank you for coming on. How's your morning going?

Mike01:15

Yeah, it's going good. I'm looking forward to the discussion and yeah, I'm excited about it as well.

Peter Brecht01:20

Yeah. How long have you been in oil and gas? Let's start there with just kind of a basic background of how long you've been in the industry.

Mike01:27

So I started in the industry in 1998 after 10 years in the US Navy working on submarines. So started offshore as a subsea trainee working on the rigs. And then I worked my way up into the corporate office into the technical field support and then just progressed through my career from there.

Peter Brecht01:47

Okay, so 10 years in the Navy. It's interesting. I've talked to so many people that work on the oil field that were previously in military and think you might be the first guy in the Navy though. Most were army or actually army was the predominant one. But I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of correlation between, working in oil and gas and military in terms of especially, offshore seems to be very structured and rigorous. But do you like

I got to ask the obvious question is how much did the Navy prepare you for oil and gas or did you have this inkling you're always going to do oil and gas maybe before military was what's kind of the impetus for that.

Mike02:24

Yeah, no, great question. So the only thing I knew about the oil and gas industry is when we used to across the North Sea on the surface and we would see the production platforms, off into the distance. Had no idea about oil and gas, grew up in Michigan. So obviously there was a lot of land drilling up there. And then one day I went to take a pier.

To the Career Center who was looking to get out. I was going to be a career military person, so I had done my 10 years, I was ready to do another 10. And I saw an ad for, at the time, which was a rig mechanic. And what was funny about it is it talked about even on off schedule, great pay.

And I'm thinking even on off schedule. Like I just did a six month deployment. So you're telling me you get it even on off schedule? Like how does this work? So yeah, I applied for it and was rejected as a mechanic, which is a funny story. What I taught to my mechanic friends because I didn't work on engines and do those types of things that they were looking for. My background was hydraulics, pneumatic systems, more like system components as a whole. So yeah, so I started offshore.

It had no idea. There wasn't really Google wasn't, wasn't, up and running the way it is today to where you can just go on and query things. So was the guy that showed up asking, what does BOP and LMRP stand for? And naturally my, new coworkers, did not take that very well. Like who are you? And like, how did you even get here? But no, what the Navy did prep me for was on submarines, you had to be the subject matter expert because you were underwater.

From land. We had no communication. We didn't have computers at the time. We didn't have, Gameboys and iPads and all this stuff. So I spent six hours a day basically or 12 hours a day, six hour, tower.

Mike04:17

Reading tech manuals and just trying to become a subject matter expert. And so what it really prepared me for is how to become a subject matter expert, how to learn systems, learn their functionality, and then just learn the process that what I call the part whole method, which is understand each component and then understand how it works into the greater system. So that philosophy really.

Translated for me into oil and gas and really helped me throughout my career. And that's one of the things that I try to teach people today when I'm doing assessments or training is, when you see the McCondos and the Piper Alphas and these big incidents that take place, you can't rely on your supervisor to be the all knowing expert. You need to own your space. And so if something goes wrong,

You should be able to isolate your systems. You should be able to troubleshoot it. But yeah, that's how the Navy really prepared me the best, which was understanding how things worked and then how to absorb that information as quickly as possible and then understand that when something does go wrong that you have to be the person to take action on it.

Peter Brecht05:25

Yeah, so there's a bit of it sounds like responsibility somewhere in there, right? For if for you to take responsibility for what you can learn. So I want to dive into that a little bit. Actually, I think, my favorite part of anything, and I was listening to another podcast this morning about, of all things, waste management, like how do these companies, haul trash and move it around. And it's actually pretty fascinating when you kind of get into the weeds of like what we do with things we throw in the trash and take for granted.

But one of the comments that he had was, it takes a lot of work, but a lot of times when you're it's fun for people to go into a business, analyze what's going on, figure out what the processes are, and sort of, I guess, troubleshoot it. And the guy made the comment, he's like, when I get bored, and like once a company's running and it's at 100%, he's like, I gotta go to the next thing because I just, it's boring to me. And we'll get into kind of where this is going, but.

When you're teaching people how to learn, cause it sounds like you're doing a lot of that, which is here's how we need to think through this and here's how you need to learn. How do you encourage somebody in oil and gas to first of all, take responsibility, but then rapidly learn something that is a pretty complicated subject. I can't imagine that like every scenario that comes at you can be different. And, you have to be able to react accordingly. So like, what are some of the things that you're sharing with them that

We could apply maybe just in our normal life.

Mike06:51

Yeah, that's a great question. An example that I use is you should be able to, so for me on submarines, we had to draw the entire submarine. So every system, regardless if I worked on it or not, I had to draw it like a schematic, not to a P and ID level, but to be able to draw the functionality of it. So as part of our qualification assessments, they would say we'd have to walk the system.

Peter Brecht07:06

Interesting. Okay.

Mike07:17

And so somebody would say, hey, what is that? And they'd point at some random thing and you had to be able to identify it. What does it do? How does it work? But then the drawing of the system, what it did is it tied the...

Basically the visual to the mental side of it. So if I can draw a control system at a very functional level, then it lets my assessor know, or even myself, that I understand how the system works. And so one of the things that I mentioned to teams when I'm working with them is you should be able to draw the systems that you work on. For blowout preventers, what I say is you're a droplet of water. I want you to come into the mixing system.

Get mixed through the BOP fluid, get pumped down to the blowout preventer and actually be fired out, the upper annular, for an example, draw for me the interaction of that water throughout the entire system. I've seen guys with 20 years in the industry in that discipline who can't do that because what we've been taught and trained is

The schematic is the answer or the person in the office is the answer. Now he might be great at a component level. He's disassembled it a hundred times or a thousand times in his career.

But when you really start getting into the finer details of knowledge and competency, can they truly understand what all is taking place? And so I start with the very basics of, if, you can use this for, it's a great question that you had, you can use this for anything. If you're in the office working on, you could be a CPA. It's what is the process of how I, process,

Peter Brecht08:51

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike09:03

Payroll or how I process anything. What is the flow path? What interactions do I have? What software am I using? If the software doesn't work, what could be the potential hangups outside of a bug in the system? And then what is the flow as it, what is the next person doing with it? So it's like the old saying about managing up. It's also

How does it flow through the system? And so that's what I break it down to from a functional level when I'm working with crews. And it could be waste management. It could be, line chef at a restaurant. It's how do we start from the basic ingredients and get all the way to that masterpiece that sits on somebody's table.

Peter Brecht09:43

Yeah. I, is the stuff that this is why I love talking to people. Cause I, so we run an academy program and teach interns about, how businesses work and insurance and oil and gas is like kind of the leading part of the conversation. And one, one thing we have them go through is like, what's the life cycle of a well, like write it out. But I never thought about it from the holistic perspective. Look, do you want to be working in any industry? It's like, we should probably

Be able to draw the org chart, right? Like who reports to who and how does all that kind of flow? Because again, I've found, and maybe this is similar, but the transferring of information is sometimes a bottleneck, right? Where it's like, okay, we're taking all this information out, especially with AI, and we're like, we can just do so much with it. Like, well, we can't answer what we're gonna do with it until we know where it needs to go. So just the simplification of like, let's draw this out.

Mike10:33

That's right.

Peter Brecht10:38

That's such a I love that idea. I'm actually gonna I'm gonna apply that here in a couple weeks with our next group. So yeah, yeah.

Mike10:44

And you mentioned, sorry, just real quick, you mentioned insurance. So as a business owner.

I don't understand the back end of what takes place with insurance. I know that I need insurance and I know that I call somebody and somebody goes, here, this form out. But understanding like what goes through that process, it goes from here, we're going to talk to an underwriter and then the underwriter is going to look at these things. The more people can understand the interactions of the process. Some people will say, look, I don't care. I'm going to fill my form out, you go do what you got to do. But for the people who are trying to move through their careers, especially in oil and gas, because

Peter Brecht10:52

Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

Mike11:19

There is a high turnover. It's very competitive. And with the, I'll call it the downturn or with the mergers and acquisitions that are happening, is how do you position yourself to be next? When I was in high school, I didn't care about my grades. If I needed an A, I could get an A. If I just wanted to get Cs, I could get Cs. It used to drive my mother crazy. How, yep.

Peter Brecht11:20

Yeah, extremely.

Peter Brecht11:30

Mm-hmm.

Peter Brecht11:40

Throttle on throttle off right yeah

Mike11:43

However, when I got in the Navy, they said the better you do on this test, the faster you get moved up in advancement. So we had tiers for first increment, second increment, third increment. Well, when you use that for your career, like if I'm in a group of people, how do I position myself from knowledge, skills, and ability to stand out from everybody else? A lot of people look at it for as a nine to five or a six to six. But if you're that person who's hungry and wants to continuously move forward,

It's the easiest way to do it.

Peter Brecht12:14

Yeah. And, I think, kind of going back on the process, think a lot of companies feel like their process is the proprietary part of what they do. Right. It's like, well, I'm to come in and I'm going to install my ideas into what you're doing. And that's going to become the thing. As a, I'm going to offer my clients this and I don't want to like spell it out for them too much. Cause someone else might take it. I think it's almost a competitive advantage to share a little bit about what you're doing. Right. I don't know.

People feel differently about that. But I'm sure there's things that you do that maybe, you spent time crafting that design and how you kind of implement it. But and then your companies obviously kind of go along with that. So jumping into your entrepreneurial side, right? So you are you just started or you've been working on this new venture with core kognition But could you maybe let's kind of reroll this a little bit and tell us about your past ventures and

Maybe share, I guess, some of the wins and losses from those two, right? Because we do have a lot of younger folks listening. So high school and college age that are listening to this. And I don't know if they understand like the I don't know, I'm an entrepreneur myself, and maybe more of an entrepreneur like to work in companies and kind of fix them rather than go start my own kind of idea. But those wins and losses are huge. So maybe roll us back a little bit and share your background on that.

Mike13:39

Yeah, so as I mentioned, I worked for a drooling contractor up until 2015. Had great exposure throughout my career of being in different challenging locations. One of them was I actually had to testify during the Macondo hearings. So having that exposure to the interaction and the catastrophic event that took place really opens your eyes to the risk.

Peter Brecht13:54

No way.

Peter Brecht14:01

Legal side too, I'm sure. Yeah.

Mike14:07

Of what happens when, not only when things go wrong, but from an operation standpoint, the documentation, the record keeping, like what is the operator, I use the term all the time for offshore workers, I say today's not the day you need to be worried about. And it's six months ago when you performed this task or whatever procedure you did, and what notes did you put in the maintenance system? Because that's what somebody is gonna go back and look at when there's a failure.

All they have is the written record. So having that exposure, I left in 2015 to start.

Deepwater Subsea, which was a technical consulting company that was focused on delivering operational excellence to drilling contractors and operators. And so we focused on the four things or the three things at the time that really led to a non-productive time, which was regulatory compliance, competency, and then training as a whole for the crews. I had that for seven years, very exciting.

Real-time monitoring came along in 2018, 2019. So we started looking at data and what can you do with the data and how can you utilize that data to improve operations, challenge the...

Kind of the status quo on why we do things the way we do as oil and gas from a maintenance standpoint, because my thing was, the data is telling us one thing, but the OEMs and different strategies tell us something different. Why do we do what we do? And so I've always had that bug to try to continuously improve even as myself. But the entrepreneur side, which was exciting, was the ability to not only

Mike15:56

Influence change, but to help others achieve excellence. And so if that was individuals on the team, if it was the companies that we supported, when I used to bring teams, individuals on board, one of the things that I always used to say is, I want you to be better tomorrow than you were today. Like I want you to continuously improve and everything I can do to teach you, I'm here for it. And so the downfall is, one of the kind of the

Challenging points was when you start a company and you're the kind of the lead face of the organization, if you don't grow it correctly and have a support team around you, I had great people working for me, but I always had this fear that we were going to grow too big because

The decisions all came back to me and it wasn't designed that way intentionally. Was just my team knew that if we said this is what we're going to do that they had my support and you know because of the past that I would go stand in court with you and say look I made the decision and this is what we're going to do. So we were heavily focused on the Gulf of Mexico.

So I think for an entrepreneur is one, don't be afraid, especially today with AI and what you can do from a learning aspect. But two is build a team with you that not only has other things that they can bring to the table from knowledge, skills, and abilities, but to also be there to support. And that to me is what's really important.

Peter Brecht17:16

Mm-hmm.

Peter Brecht17:33

What's your favorite size company to build? Like for me, I sort of look at if I could grow, we're currently at 34 employees as of Monday. And I think our threshold is like a hundred. After a hundred people, I'm like, man, this is, too big of an organization with too many layers of, responsibility and who talks to who. Even if I do go and draw it out, right, I still think it'd become complicated. As a company that's advising and going,

Talking to these companies or drilling offshore and doing all that, what's the ideal size company to where you are still involved but also maybe not required for every decision? What's that look like size-wise? There's really no answer. It's just how well you structure it from the beginning.

Mike18:20

Yeah, I think it's how you structure it from the beginning because I mean, you could be a team of four and be just chaotic depending on how you put the framework together. And the other challenge to that though is from a leadership standpoint.

Peter Brecht18:27

True.

Mike18:34

You need people who are like-minded because if you're dealing with recommendations not only for compliance or for human performance, you have to understand that the things that you're putting out there, others believe in as well. This isn't just a job, right? I mean, it's a job, but you have to have a passion for it you want to make change because it would be too easy to go out there and say, yeah, I agree with you that this is kind of stupid, but that's what I've been told to do. And you lose all credibility when that happens.

Peter Brecht19:04

Absolutely. And yeah, I can agree a hundred percent with what you're saying. The other part is as you're growing and like, let me just take this AI thing, for example, right? There are people that are adopting it and people that aren't and, that's going to happen in any company. And I'm sure you're seeing the same thing with anything offshore or oil and gas related as you have companies are like, look, we were kind of in on this. We're not really sure. And I'm not sure where AI falls into to your work. And we can talk about that in a moment, but, with, just adoption of, cause some people are going to go a lot faster now because they decide to adopt something versus not and trying to keep everyone on the same page. It's, a challenge, and the more people you have, the more chances there are. And I'm fortunate I work with some people that, I think I made the comment, this was last week. I wake up knowing that everyone around me is, is going to run faster or harder than I will. And I have to keep up. And I love being in that situation where.

You if I'm getting a phone call at 430 in the morning, it's like it's, first of all, there's something meaningful on the end of that. But it's also like, I got to get up out of bed and get running. Right. So very blessed there myself, but let's talk about AI for a second. And I want to talk about your, after that, we'll talk about your current venture and dig into that. But are you using AI or are you seeing AI being deployed in oil and gas and in like, and not just from a like, I'm going to go on Jack GPT and ask it some questions about a blowout preventer.

Like real meaningful structure, process, safety, all that stuff.

Mike20:36

Yeah, I have, but I think the challenge is, is there's a lot of companies because of, and I don't want to say this like perception, but it's, it, you're loading documents into a rag system or you're using, Claude or any, any, LLM to do work in and out, look at the data. You have to understand what you're going to get out of it. And I think what happens is there's.

From a cybersecurity standpoint, from a data confidentiality standpoint, there's a lot of companies who are still very fearful and I get it. However, the value of the information that comes out of it can transform the way companies do things, both from a knowledge gaining and a knowledge sharing. It's so, one of the things that I see from operations is having the ability to start linking reports together. And so,

If you're looking at daily reports from your operations team, even if it's getting kind of redacted and cleansed before it goes into the system, if you start compiling what happens over the course of a well, and now you go into an end of well period, then looking at the inspection reports that people are actually finding with the equipment, you can now correlate back to during the well when this actually happened.

But it's having that mindset to say, and it actually happened to me by accident because I was reading daily reports from surveyors on the rig. And one of them said that they found milling and they call it swarf, like metal shavings inside the blowout preventer. And I went, why would we have metal shavings in the blowout preventer? Well, five months earlier, they milled a window in the casing. Well, with everything that's been going on in life, you forget what happened five months ago. So I said, is there a way that I could load this every day?

Peter Brecht22:17

Hmm.

Peter Brecht22:20

Yeah, no kidding.

Mike22:24

It generates for me a summary looking for keywords, milling influx, kick, stock pipe, things that would be traditionally considered abnormal situations or would lead to extraordinary maintenance. And then it flags it ahead of time. So now you're going into your end of well period and your age in.

Peter Brecht22:26

Mm-hmm.

Mike22:45

Is actually generating a report to say, by the way, this is what's taken place over the last six months from cycle counts and potential wear and usage that you could use now for your maintenance. And so it's getting those two linked together because what happens today, I think there's a lot of firefighting that takes place. There's a lot of fear and risk. And if you just step back and say, OK, what can I actually gain from this information?

Another great example is if you look at kicks that have happened over the years or blowouts and you load those reports that are readily available off from the internet, what you find when you start analyzing it from situational awareness, decision-making, cognitive load, you start finding that people were delaying the reaction of a kick, which then led to a blowout.

By simply uploading the document with a prompt or an agent that goes and actually looks for these specific things, which you very quickly get is knowledge and information about why potentially our crew is failing in the most critical moments, then that turns into training.

Continuous learning and all those type of things. So for me, AI, as soon as I open my computer up in the morning, I have four language models that pop up on the screen and I play in and out of them because each have their value. But yeah, I see companies now more and more utilizing it for maintenance assessments. So learning over history of lessons learned and failures. And then I see the next wave being where you can

Interact with it to say, I am at this point in my well, based on historical, programs, what risks should I be looking out for? And it'll say, well, the last time we were at this depth with this type of casing and these pressures, we had this, and this happened. And so you're preempting situational awareness for potential things that could go wrong.

Peter Brecht24:51

That totally makes sense. And I like, I like how you're like historical information to help with the current. And I'm bouncing around here and Wade would tell you I'm notorious for doing that, but you dropped a word and you said safety. It was, a couple of paragraphs back there, but the question kind of came up to me was, and I don't know, I might've been talking with you about this on the phone or maybe it somebody else, but it's a great topic nonetheless, but I'm curious if oil and gas companies like big red, big blue, are they competing to get employees based on

EHS and safety record? Is that something that they talk about as not a like a competitive advantage? Or is it more? And where I'm going with this is, I feel like if more companies shared EHS publicly and like best practices, and maybe they already do, and I need to be educated on that myself. But it would that that part alone would help the industry, right? And I don't know, maybe it sounds like you might know a little bit about that. But I wanted to kind of open up the box here. And then we'll get into core kognition.

Mike25:51

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, know like with IOGP and some of the operator groups, they share information I know for reliability, where it's mandated here in the Gulf of Mexico to share failure data with your blow up preventers. But I'm not, yeah, I'm not too sure of how they do it from an overall kind of level because a lot of times it's probably seriously ridiculous.

Peter Brecht26:06

Like IADC stuff, right?

Mike26:17

Cleansed to, if you're looking at a company X has, bad performance with their employees, well, the risk of drilling contractors or insurance companies wanting to deal with them would be pretty substantial. That part I'm not 100 % on, but I do know that historically through different organizations, they'll submit that type of information, blowouts, kicks, failure data.

Peter Brecht26:42

And eventually it probably comes out if there's something that needs to be fixed there. We'll see the fix or the change through engineering, right? It's like, okay, we're going to re-engineer this, but maybe that happens over the course of a year or two or three even. Right. I just thought I'd note that I know like one of my big things that I'm thinking about all the time is there are EHS platforms out there that, that, that we utilize or would look at, but I don't feel like, that that specialization towards oil and gas. It's like, okay, we're gonna use this. It's just a generalist tool for contracting. It's like, no, that's not what this is. Like we need something that's more ingrained, that's available to, small to mid market companies. And that level of advisement where it's like, hey, let me take a look at what you have with a meaningful implementation of some ideas, someone like you could look at and say, here's what we need to fix. So anyways, we'll fast forward to current day now and talk about core kognition. So tell us about your new venture and what you're doing.

With all that.

Mike27:39

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Core Cognition Global. Throughout my career, one of the things that I've always done and looked at was we talk a lot about human factors. We talk a lot about safety and we talk a lot about risk from an academia standpoint. Look, the research is out there and the benefits of it, but it doesn't seem to cross over to offshore. So one of the things that's always kind of frustrated me and

When I looked at or was a part of incident investigations was it always came back to human error. And so what I would say is, well, yeah, it's always gonna come back to human error because a human's actually doing work. And very few companies would ever say, hey, look, it's our fault, we're a bad company. It's easier from a liability standpoint to push it out to the human. So as I would go through teaching procedural discipline, quality assurance, I kept tying it back to risk and performance to say, okay,

How do we, can you identify every place that human error could happen in this procedure? And people would say, well, yeah, yeah, I can. And I'd say, okay, well, let's walk through it. So we would do that. What it led to is basically what core kognition is today, which is, a human performance in cognitive reliability company that focuses on trying to eliminate human error, both from a operations standpoint, but also from a

True competency and training standpoint. So we still do compliance work. We still look at data. But at the end of the day, my passion at the moment, or part of this, which is why I call it core kognition is because core is talking about, excuse me, compliance, operational readiness, reliability, and equipment performance.

Peter Brecht29:16

Mm-hmm.

Mike29:26

However, the kognition part is let's be smart about the way we do things, right? Let's be smart about the way we analyze compliance, operational readiness. But my focus is if we look at trying to eliminate human error, why do we have human error? Like nobody shows up to work and says, today I'm gonna crush Peter's hand.

Peter Brecht29:46

Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Mike29:46

But Peter still gets injured and why does that happen? And so what I've done is I've looked at the different frameworks that are used. I've looked at the different ways that people actually like using the terms like work is imagined as work is done, but it's like, okay, people go out to do work and yet things happen. And from my experience with Macondo and from working on the rigs, what we've done is we've built frameworks around how do we optimize reliability, human reliability?

That delivers operational excellence. And so we look at pre-job briefs talking about from a situational awareness standpoint. So instead of just going here, read this JSA and everybody signs it. It's really going into that framework I talked about earlier about, if something's going to go wrong, what could go wrong? And then let the crew tell you, okay, this is what could go wrong.

But Core Cognition Global is focused on human performance and risk and safety because one of the other things that we looked at, especially with the utilization of third party crews, is as supervisors are now being pulled away and pushed into an administrative role.

Who's actually out there doing the work. And it's the junior personnel and third parties. Well, as that happens, I've built a framework that I call age, is autonomy, guidance and encouragement. So for every task, you have different crews that go out there to do the work based on their experience, based on the actual task itself, based on the task load. There's a different scale of risk that happens with the performance or the execution of that.

Tasks that you're getting ready to do. By looking at it at that level, you can minimize and mitigate human error because if I have the right people doing the work, they have the right understanding, who have the right situational awareness, then you get an understanding of, why do things go wrong when they go wrong? And so one of the things that I did in here recently is kind of

Peter Brecht31:28

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike31:50

Going sideways for a second, as I looked at the Swiss cheese model that, industry uses for accidents and incidents. They say, okay, it's different levels and the organization and then, this and this. I said, well, if I remove everything behind Peter and Peter has to go do a task, what leads to Peter having human error?

Peter Brecht32:01

Mm-hmm.

Mike32:11

Well, it says mindfulness or is awareness of what's going on. So how mindful are you? Are you daydreaming? Are you bored? Are you fatigued? Are you stressed? Then it leads into situational awareness, which is, you know.

Peter Brecht32:12

Hmm.

Mike32:25

Do you perceive change of what's happening? Are you aware of what could go wrong? And if something does go wrong, what's going to happen after that? So if I'm starting to take off a bonnet bolt, for an example, or I'm taking off a hose, bonnet bolts are probably best. Our industry is notorious for saying if it's not coming off, get a bigger wrench. My question is, why is it not coming off the way it's supposed to come off? So normal, not normal. Well, if we start making people or helping people to think,

Now you can start eliminating what leads to human error. So based on different frameworks, based on the interaction with the crews, one of the things that the core kognition does not do is we do not add layers on top of what the current companies already use. So we're not changing your JSA. We're not changing your operations procedures. We'll look at it from a task.

Cognitive load standpoint. But at the end of the day, CoreCognition is an operational excellence company that focuses on the individuals and the assets to achieve operational excellence.

Peter Brecht33:28

You've mentioned cognitive load a couple times here and you're just in that case referring to an individual's ability or inability to think just because they have too much going on, right? Is that right? Okay.

Mike33:42

Yeah, so if you think about cognitive load, but also like the task load. So is this a strenuous task that takes a lot of mental capacity to actually do it? Or is it a very easy task that there's nothing there? So when you look at NASA had this matrix, it was called a task load analysis. And it really opened my eyes to, if you think of what happens after you've done a presentation or if you've gone and had to do something very mentally straining,

Peter Brecht33:45

Okay.

Mike34:10

When you're done, you're just exhausted. Even though you've done nothing but stand there and talk for six hours, you're drained. And that's because the cognitive load is basically just wearing you down. Well, when you start looking at fatigue and stress and performance influencing factors, what do all those things do to the individual in that moment? And removing the academia side from it and just thinking about from a true operation standpoint, if

John Doe is out there doing his job and his supervisor is looking over his shoulder. His situational awareness isn't on the task. It's thinking about what is he doing behind me. So it's trying to train and teach and really help companies understand that you can have the greatest HSC programs. You can have the greatest frameworks.

But there's always this transition that happens when it leaves the corporate office and goes out to the rig. And why, after 40 years, are we still talking about human factors and human error and slips, trips, and falls you'll never get rid of? That happens. But Mike crushing somebody's hand, something went wrong in that moment. And then how do we eliminate that?

Peter Brecht35:14

Right.

Peter Brecht35:25

Gotcha. We'll start moving towards the end here. In 10 years, what do you think the oil and gas industry will be talking about? I know today, the topic is all AI and like, what's WTI doing today? Well, it's going to the moon apparently. What are we going to be talking about in 10 years from now that maybe we could prepare for? I know that's a tough question to ask, but sort of a theoretical one.

Mike35:49

Yeah, I think the drilling process as a whole isn't going to change. Like we're still going to drill wells the way we drill wells. I think the biggest transformation that's going to take place is the understanding of how work is really done and what you can do with data. Just a quick example, we have so much information now that we've captured over the last five, 10, 20 years of failures and performance that

Peter Brecht35:53

Okay. Yeah.

Mike36:15

I posed the question, if you threw out your maintenance system today and started from scratch, can you build a more reliable platform that's more sufficient to the way things really happen? And the answer is yes, because the data now shows us that. And so I think you're going to see this transformation of...

Peter Brecht36:30

Okay. Yeah.

Mike36:37

More lean operations from a performance standpoint because we've done a great job for trying to eliminate risk by stacking more and more and more on top.

And I think what's going to happen is hopefully we're going to start purging that down to where people can go out and actually perform tasks. But drilling is going to be drilling. You're always going to have people on the rigs. But I think that we're going to train people better. We're going to support them better because we're starting to see that now with what people call safety too and resilient engineering and really trying to just be mindful of the human element.

But I think what you're going to see is our industry is forward thinking as we want to be is really starting to embrace data and AI analytics to help us do what we do.

Peter Brecht37:26

Love it. Well, I'm gonna, I'll wrap us up here. Michael, thank you so much for coming on. I will have all your links in the show notes if people wanna reach out to you. I know you can find Michael on LinkedIn. But man, thank you so much. I learned a lot. Cannot wait to put together the notes and review what we've talked about today. And I hope we get to catch up again soon.

Mike37:47

No, I appreciate it. I really enjoyed it.

Peter Brecht37:50

All right. Talk to you soon. Bye. All right, man. That was great. I'm going to let us roll here for a second. Just, it's all good. I kind of like to rewrap things, but, I, we're kind of like playing with different parts of show, but again, at the beginning, if you're cool and you want to do it, just say, if you want to record, say, Hey, this is Michael Fry with core correlation global. You're listening to local energy and that would be a great opener introduction to you. And then we'll go into it. I'll let you do it on your comfort level. There you go.

Mike37:51

Thanks.

Mike37:56

Cool.

Mike38:14

Cool.

Can let me get a drink real quick.

Mike38:22

It's the most I've talked in, it feels like two months. It's...

Peter Brecht38:26

I have to recover this weekend.

Mike38:29

Yeah, what's funny is just real fast. I used to do a podcast with Deepwater Subsea and I had the mics and everything set up and we loaded it on iTunes and, you could tweak it so well that it sounded like you were on the radio. And so it was perfect. Or, you know.

Peter Brecht38:36

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I like I got this microphone completely unnecessary. I just like that it was red, I was like, that's a cool color, but you don't need any of this. Was just I honestly told my producer I'm like, I could do this on my iPhone. Now it's the technology is so good. So it'll make everything sound real good. But yeah, no, I love just talking to people and you learn so much from the people like, every day, I probably talk to 30 people. But these are the most meaningful ones, because I get to actually draw it out a little bit more. So

Mike38:48

Yeah.

Mike38:54

That's crazy.

Mike38:58

Cool.

Mike39:09

Hopefully there's value to the listener so I know I kind of jump around but...

Peter Brecht39:10

Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, it's, that's the whole thing. And it's fun. You look at our demographic and it's predominantly, I think it's like 86 % male and the age group is, 22 to 34 is sort of the, so it's a really cool, it's a cool thing to do. I don't know. It's a lot of fun. You're good. We'll get the intro done. It's the hard part. That's the hardest part of the show.

Mike39:25

Wow.

Mike39:31

Cool, well let me get to your intro.

Mike39:38

Sometimes. Hi, this is Michael Fry with Core Cognition Global, and you're listening to Local Energy.

Peter Brecht39:46

Love it. Thank you. Real quick, before I let you go, what is the best movie about submarines? I personally, think Crimson Tide is really good, but do you have a favorite or no comment?

Mike39:58

So no, I love Crimson Tide. There was a lot of, I mean it was a good movie. Gene Hackman, Denzel, like how do you not have a good movie? A little dramatized with the, but it's not the hunt for October. So yeah, I mean it's probably a.

Peter Brecht40:07

Right. Sure.

Peter Brecht40:13

Okay, all right. Gotcha. Yeah, that's I mean, that is the that is the movie. But yeah, makes sense. Awesome. All right. Well, Michael, thank you so much. I'm excited. I'm gonna hit stop here.

Mike40:18

Yeah. Yeah.