Lessons from COSIA: A conversation with Gordon Lambert.
Gordon Lambert retired from Suncor, took on the role of interim Chief Executive Officer of the Alberta Energy Regulator, and retired again. After my conversation with him on episode #18 of the Cool Collaborations podcast, I’m not sure he’ll ever really be out of the action.
Gord and I have had a few conversations in recent months, but our conversation for the podcast about the origins of Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance or COSIA was pretty illuminating. The alliance came together in 2012 to sign the COSIA Charter. In our conversation, Gord sheds a little light on how the collaboration came to be.
Dissatisfaction with Current State
As one of the main architects of COSIA, Gord realized that there was a shared challenge that was beyond the competition of the individual companies; a space where competition really didn’t make sense. He was referring to the management of the environment at a regional scale, well beyond the normal operating conditions of a company. Gord describes how leadership within the various companies had to come to a new way of thinking about the role of their own companies and the possibility of collaborating.
In the past, I’ve written about the role of a ‘spark plug’ to get collaboration started. In the case of COSIA, it seems that one spark plug (Gord) had to somehow create a spark plug within each company to carry the collaboration idea all the way to the most senior company leaders. It seems those first discussions amongst the COSIA founding companies would have been critical to explore what was possible without restrictions.
Top-Down Direction
Energy companies are in competition with one another, and they purposely build cultures that highlight their own strengths. Often, a company’s technical expertise is seen as what makes it different. As Gord describes the COSIA formation, it was the top-down direction from CEO’s that helped to overcome the cultural tendency toward not being collaborative with another company. The COSIA Charter laid the groundwork for collaboration and for sharing of immense intellectual property, something that had never been done in the energy sector before. The charter is supported by legal agreements.
I’ve been involved with many collaborative and consensus processes that have put together reports and recommendations. The COSIA example, though, takes this to an entirely new level. I can only imagine some of the negotiations and discussions that had to occur to make it all work.
Trust Building
Once COSIA came together, the collaborating companies began to see the benefits of working together. Shared testing of technology helped to shorten the time from idea to deployment, creating operational efficiency and saving capital in a very capital intense industry. Companies agreed to shared intellectual property for most things that were not associated with extraction (e.g., surface technology) which ended up totalling an astounding $1.3B in intellectual property.
Today, after almost 10 years, COSIA’s collaboration has expanded. Companies have worked together in the collaborative space and understand what can be gained from working together, even in areas where they compete. They’ve been trying out new and innovative ways to spark new ideas, such as the Carbon XPrize that was recently awarded.
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Gord’s description of the genesis of COSIA is inspirational and awe-inspiring, in part because of its vision and scale, but also because of its success. Be sure to listen in to some of the other things we discuss in the full episode of the podcast with Gordon Lambert.
Happy collaborating.
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. As the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
