Subsurface Evangelising – Preaching to the Choir

I was a board member of a small oil company, and we were sent on public relations training. My assessment included the following: “Under no circumstance should Juan be allowed to talk with either the Press or the Public”. It continued: “He has an inability to hide his contempt for those who do not share his enthusiasm for geology or the oil industry”.

The readers of GEO EXPRO are neither the press nor the public, so we’re good.

We work amidst mind-boggling contrasts. Short timeframes, slashed budgets, skeleton teams – and then we’re asked to locate a half-billion-dollar semi-sub, drill a 5 km hole, deploy hundreds of people across dozens of companies, at a cost of a hundred million dollars. Given a fair wind and sun on our backs, that choice of ours could generate five, or fifty billion dollars of profit and tens of thousands of jobs.

The Sin: We risk becoming less our authentic innovative selves and more part of a process. A worn and habituated cog in a pressurised machine. We protect ourselves against overbearing expectations with repetition, routine, formula, and pre-defined workflows. Companies protect themselves with “best practice” and individually we settle for groupthink and playing it safe.

Each field, licence or asset has a unique set of subsurface characteristics demanding unique viewpoints. We are not pattern-finding monkeys – we are unique, creative, passionate geoscientists.

If the Sin is BEWARE, then what is our Saviour?

The Saviour:  Easy! It’s us! Our curiosity and individuality. Curious enough to look at a problem differently.

The twelfth card of the Tarot is the Hanged Man, suspended from a tree – not in torture, but calm and composed, haloed in enlightenment. The imposed new perspective gives new insight. Easy to say, harder to do. The Hanged Man isn’t tortured, but he is uncomfortable. Being different, doing things differently, is uncomfortable. So, we need to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”. We need to be bold.

Be curious. See differently. Have ideas. Be bold. Remember: In the land of the bland, the one-idea’ed man is King.

But it’s not a free-for-all, to quote Tommy Norris in the brilliantly bonkers TV show LANDMAN: “You have to know the rules of the game to bend them. And you really gotta know ’em to break ’em”.

The Salvation: We have thought differently, tried differently, acted differently. Results are unique. Probably better. We have tested ourselves, challenged our team, shifted perspectives, and introduced innovation. And we know we have, and that feels great. Evolutionary improvement of the machine, one tiny act of individual creativity at a time, from that same multitude of unique, creative, passionate geoscientists.

Be aware. Be bold. Be better.

This article is a version of a 2026 EAGE Annual Conference Presentation