Why some of the best ideas come from the field

Mistakes are a part of everyone’s life. What you take from them can teach you how to improve yourself and do better in your career going forward — if you’re willing to own up to your mistakes and learn from them. My “best” mistake involved dismissing an out-of-the-box idea from two young employees without giving them the time they deserved on what ultimately became one of Halliburton’s premier, flagship solutions for our deepwater customers.

Years ago while running Halliburton’s operations in Angola, we were faced with developing systems to tackle the completion of deeper, more complex wells in a very challenging area. There were two employees who really had to run some tough completions, and they came to me with a pretty creative idea — one that would run the jobs cheaper and faster. But it didn’t seem like a viable option at the time, so I told them to quit focusing on anything but the jobs our clients wanted us to do — stop messing around with brainstorming and do the work at hand.

Fast forward a few years and I’m leading operations in Indonesia, tendering work for a client where they needed a completion solution. We went to our archives to look at possible solutions and found a PowerPoint presentation with an animation that was exactly what we needed. I looked at it and thought: “This is it.” Where did it came from? No one was more shocked than me to learn it was the same solution presented to me five or six years before by two eager employees in Angola — an idea that I dismissed. The animation was a great solution, and in fact ended up being our ESTMZ™ system — a technology that changed the way Halliburton works in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico.

These employees working in the shop came up with a deepwater solution that we didn’t use until five or six years after they initially brainstormed the idea. The delay in bringing the idea to the market was because I failed to encourage those guys and invest money in the solution when they brought it to me. Clearly, we did not win the project in Indonesia. We eventually developed a better solution than our competitors, but for me this mistake forever changed my thinking about technology.

Today, I’m hypersensitive to the ideas that come out of the field. I have learned there are employees who may be working on the tasks at hand but who also have ideas that are waiting to be recognized. I spend a lot of time listening to those ideas and encouraging employees to be creative and to try to feed the front end of the technology tunnel. Most often, creative solutions to field challenges don’t emanate from the corporate office. They’re thought up in the field, from employees doing the actual fieldwork on an everyday basis… where a client is facing a problem and the field employee figures out a way to make the whole problem go away. With just a little encouragement, some of the greatest ideas become advanced technological solutions that allow us to better serve our clients. Not listening is a mistake I will not make again.

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Jeff Miller is the President and Chief Health, Safety and Environment Officer at Halliburton.