November is finally here and December draws near; just 61 days remain before we can officially close the book on 2015. With the down markets, idle rigs and wells waiting for completion, many may see the year as one best fit for the horror section of their local library, but sadly it was not a work of fiction.

Others may see the year as a great how-to book, but that particular genre requires readers daring enough to venture into the self-help section to find it. For those having just finished it for the first time, there may be little interest to stick around for a second reading.

Top 10 lists, thanks to retired American talk show host David Letterman, have become a popular way to quickly convey knowledge and sound guidance without needing to wander lost for 40 years in a library. Jeff Moss, drilling adviser at Exxon Mobil, offered industry newcomers his own top 10 list for surviving the downturn in his presentation during the “Managing the Future Impact of Current Cost Cutting” special session of the 2015 Society of Petroleum Engineers Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.

The list, based on Moss’ 30-plus years in the petroleum industry plus input from other “esteemed industry professionals,” is chockfull of advice for the green hats and the not-so-green hats. “Safety, integrity and excellence” is one fit for a tattoo, for example. “Learn to thrive in uncertainty” and “if you can’t be indispensable, at least be useful” are two that I have certainly learned the hard way.

The one that hit a nerve in the room was No. 7.

“When you fail, fail early and fail well,” he said. “If you’re doing your job, you will fail. Manage expectations; early failures are easy to manage. In failing well, explain not only why you failed, but what you are going to do to prevent failure in the future.”

Learning from those failures is not something the industry always does very well.

“We’re terrible at planning experiments in our business,” he said. “We’ll go out and try something, and it won’t work. We don’t have a clue why it doesn’t work, so we’ll do it again and again. After awhile, management will decide they have had enough; they are not going to stick their hand in that meat grinder anymore. We move on, but we don’t necessarily catch our warnings from those failures.”

It was noted during the Q&A that the industry does well talking about its success, but rarely are its failures discussed. Like surgeons and their post-mortem reviews after a patient dies, the sharing of project details and failures in safe and open environments helps others learn and grow.

There’s more than one way to learn that a stove is hot, so why do we revert back to the tried and true method of touching the burner? How can we create teaching opportunities from, as one panelist put it, our “glorious failures” and see that 2016 ends up on the best-seller list for success stories?

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