Planning for resilient collaboration at a new petroleum installation – A case study of a coaching approach

The current paper reports the case study of a coaching process assisting an oil company in exploring how to establish a potential for resilient collaboration. When a new petroleum installation is being prepared for operation, a range of decisions is made that impacts the possibility for achieving resilient collaboration, i.e., collaboration that is sufficiently robust and flexible to work efficiently and safely across the various operational states that may arise, within the organization. It is, thus, of key importance that issues related to resilient collaboration – what collaboration should be like and how to achieve the desired way of collaborating – are addressed from an early point in the preparatory phase, to increase the likelihood that e.g., the work processes, tools and technologies, established jointly will come to promote the resilient collaboration. The purpose of the present study was to assess whether a coaching approach called, Coaching for Resilient Collaboration in IO (CORECIO), would be able to promote reflections about what resilient collaboration should imply in a planned organization, and help achieve alignment about this, in the early part of the preparatory process. Eight employees involved in preparing for operation of the new petroleum installation participated in the study, which involved the conduction of five workshops. The paper addresses strengths and limitations of CORECIO, and suggests how coaching might constitute a useful approach for assisting highly skilled professionals in preparing for resilient collaboration at a new petroleum installation in the early, conceptual, part of a design phase.