A Texas Wildcatter as Design Thinker

The current Issue of Texas Monthly (the cover is great - The Great Texas Oil Boom: Ever is Happening Right Now.  You Want In?) is a must read.  The issue has a series of articles on the oil boom in Texas.  One is on George Mitchell, the father of hydraulic fracturing - - under Mitchell's leadership that geologists and engineers developed the process for using fracking to unlock previously unreachable reservoirs of oil and natural gas.

From the article:

"In early 1981 the company drilled the C.W. Slay No. 1, which produced moderate results.  Mitchell wasn't satisfied.  He knew the Barnett held lots of gas, and he was determined to find a drilling technique that could release it.  The company had used hydraulic fracturing in 1979, doubling the production of a conventional gas well in Limestone Country, and Mitchel decided to try it again.

At that time, geologists knew that shale was a source for oil and natural gas, but the prevailing theory was that such deposits could be extracted only through natural fractures.  Most of those occurred close to the surface.  Mitchell decided to try fracturing the rock artificially at greater depths.  The early attempts at fracking were all made in vertical wells, and while Mitchell found that production increased significantly, he still thought he could do better.

"The fracking technique was born almost entirely out of necessity," said Robert Gray, an energy investor and longtime tennis buddy of Mitchell's.  "He took grade-C resources and figured out how to make money with them."  During the next seventeen years, the company's wells would become a fracking test bed, and exercise in trial and error.

Mitchell is a great example of idea that business people don't need to understand engineers and designers better - - they need to become designers.  Success today aries not from emulating others (and Mitchell could have retired rich just doing this), but by evolving unique models, products, and experiences - - in short, creative solutions.  Fracking illustrates the importance of looking at a problem or a creation from different angles and understanding the energy and excitement that you can generate.

Rotman on Design is a great book.  Get you copy today.  One of the chapters (Deconstructing the Design Thinker by Sohrab Vossoughi) examines the qualities of design thinkers.  George Mitchell would probably agree with the highlights of the article.

How a design thinker sees the world and thinks - -

1. Design thinkers are internally-motivated by challenge and curiosity - Mitchell had a desire to effect change and the pleasure of figuring something.  The twin challenges of complexity and difficulty are key motivators.
2. Design thinkers alternate between intuition and analysis - Intense focus (combined with intense periods of defocus - - Bill Gates is a great example), reality testing, listening, learning, messing around, not stressing, etc.  Mitchell was the master of the learning-messing around-learning-messing around cycle of design thinking.
3. Design thinkers are inherently multidisciplinary - An innate desire for new knowledge and abilities - - even it there's no immediate application for them.  Mitchell didn't have tunnel vision and understood that new drilling techniques were a combination of geology, chemistry, engineering, and construction.
4. Design thinkers are optimistic and tenacious - The key qualities of design thinkers tend to be optimism, tenacity, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.  The three things important to design thinkers - - learn, learn, learn.  Mitchell has this sheer force of will that doesn't let you give up.  Just look at the timeline of Mitchell's development of fracking - - this didn't happen overnight.
5. Design thinkers prefer prototypes to theories - The language of Mitchell's work is insightful.  Trial and error, testing, experimentation everyday - - this ultimately worked out for Mitchell because he drilled and drilled and drilled - - while learning something new every time.