More thoughts on the "Ten Habits"

Our popular April 2012 blog entry, "The Ten Habits of Highly Successful Oil Finders" has received some positive press lately.  As the basis of a talk, the habits were presented at the AAPG Playmaker Forum in Houston this past January, and were also covered in the Houston Chronicle. Now, we are honored to report that the habits, as conceived by Dan Tearpock and colleague Bob Shoup, are featured in the March 2013 edition of the AAPG Explorer.

In the article, SCA Founder and Chairman Emeritus Dan Tearpock delves further into the value and importance of what is also referred to as a "philosophical doctrine" guiding his and his company's professional activities.  We invite you to review some excerpts (please see the full article here):

"Developing a successful product, i.e. good prospect, is only part of the value of the 10 habits; they can be used in both directions. 

'If you drill a dry hole, the company asks what went wrong and they may hire an expert to come in and reverse engineer the prospect, tear it apart to find where the mistakes were to cause a dry hole,' Tearpock noted.'We call this step forensic geology. 

'They may find you didn’t use the 10 habits correctly, so you made a mistake in interpretation and drilled a dry hole. 

'That’s the marvelous aspect of this philosophical doctrine and the habits in it,” he said. “It can be used both ways. 

'What some people do is when they drill successful wells, they tear them apart and see what the team did to drill this successful well,” Tearpock said. 'They use the habits again to go in and see what they did and then find they pretty much followed a philosophy similar to these habits – and that’s why they had success.'

Tearpock is quick to note that this philosophical doctrine is not exclusive to SCA. 

'Some people have come up with these habits on their own,” he said, “and I don’t know how many.'

He also cites a real-world example from his own experience leading SCA:

"SCA sent out three teams for four months and evaluated a hundred proposed prospects, along with some of the dry holes from earlier. They determined what the explorationists were doing wrong. 

'For the most part they weren’t using the habits at all, except for the European division working the North Sea, which was running at an 85 percent success rate on exploration prospects,” Tearpock said. 

'This group had a 150-page manual that was literally like taking our 10 habits and expanding on them to a great degree. 

'We found that the VP of exploration and several other explorationists there had come from the company that originally conducted the study of why certain people and teams are more successful than others,' he said. 

'They brought that knowledge with them to their new company, put it into practice and showed the success it can provide' Tearpock noted."

We are pleased that the Ten Habits continue to inspire discussion. Are there examples you can share of when the application of the habits or philosophical doctrine has contributed to exploration success in your professional life? Or alternatively, when neglecting the habits has resulted in dry holes or less successful results?