As the British Petroleum’s oil well continues to gush out oil into the Gulf of Mexico unabated, it appears that the oil industry experts may not be the right people to handle this crisis because those people with the knowhow may get ignored under the present high media scrutiny.  Groupthink can become like an opiate that shields practical knowledge from getting to the crisis leadership who is consumed with putting on appearances of progress for the world press.

During my tenure working for the E. I. Du Pont De Nemours & Co., Inc. I had a penchant for conducting hose failure analysis. My efforts are captured in the 1991 Society of Automotive Engineers International paper entitled, “Systematic Techniques of Hose Failure Mode Analysis.” A key element in solving hose failures was to use a technique called facts mapping.

Facts mapping requires that all levels of people from the machine operators to the top engineers participate in sessions where everyone is required to offer her or his thinking and give rationale for their position.  Every committee member is of equal rank which insures that overbearing personalities or high ranking people do not scare off the best ideas promoting their personal agendas. Everyone must give their thinking or they are asked to leave the room because no idea is ignored. The committee is best led by an outsider who holds no allegiance to any faction.

The idea is to have people give ideas and defend them until three things fall out as efforts to try. Perhaps BP comes up with a team made up of fabricators who built the defective valve, installers, and engineers. You might find that a non-engineer or technician know some quirk that will control the situation that is not in the manuals. One of the installers may have corrected near crisis situations in the past that he did not write up or share with anybody.

You may conclude that the engineers know the science and design of the operations but the installers and operators know how to turn the engineering prototypes into functional equipment. Thus BP and the remainder of the deep well oil industry need to be canvassing their non-engineers and retirees to join facts mapping oil stoppage committees where they also share any experiences that offer sound approaches to stop the out of control oil well gushing problem.