Learning in the Digital Age: An Interview with BP's John Leggate

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John Leggate is group vice president, Digital Business, for BP. In this role, he is responsible for digital technology and e-business across the whole company, ensuring an integrated transition as the corporation moves from e-business discovery to deployment. John is a member of the BP Group Senior Leadership Team and served a key role in shaping the company's strategies following the BP-Amoco Merger. He has a particular interest in high performance teams and organizations, the management of organizational change, effective leadership, and organizational learning.

John is a keynote speaker at this year's Systems Thinking in Action Conference. Following are some of the ways BP is changing how its teams work together and communicate in designing a sustainable corporate future.

Leverage Points: Can you talk about the kinds of cutting-edge technologies you are developing to handle the complexity of reaching out to local communities, customers, contractors, partners, governments, and employees? Why is it important for an energy company to do so?

John Leggate: Let me deal with the second part of your question first. There are several reasons why it's important for an energy company to build relationships with these groups. First, as a global company, we are part of, and touch, the lives of many communities in at least 100 countries. And energy can easily become an emotive topic. So we have to conduct our operations in harmony with those communities and show them that we are a progressive business.

Second, over the long term, margins are always shrinking. To ensure the long-term viability of this industry and our own sustainable growth as a company, we will need to transform how our company and the industry does business. Technology can increase productivity, support the creativity of our people, and open up new seams of value for us. Third, the world is becoming increasingly connected-and we don't just want to be a follower in this increasing connectedness; we want to take a leadership role.

As to what we're actually doing, to name a few things, we've set up and been part of a number of Internet-based, industry-wide exchanges. We've provided collaboration tools that allow our people to work together faster, more productively, creatively, and profitably. We've introduced web broadcasts to communicate with key stakeholder groups—particularly our employees and our stockholders. We've installed Internet kiosks at our service stations for the convenience of our customers.

As to whether these developments are "cutting-edge," much of technology is no longer cutting-edge in itself-although I believe we are operating close to the limits of what digital technology, at its current stage of development, permits when applied globally. My point here is that it's not technological complexity that's the challenge; it's the broad acceptance and adoption of new ways of working and doing business. We believe in being an open company—open within our borders and open to the world in which we operate. The technology we are introducing is allowing us to express that commitment—to the company, the industry, and the world—more effectively.

LP: What role do organizational culture and personal learning play in BP's—or any company's—ability to thrive in the digital era? Why isn't superior technology enough to sustain a company into the future?

JL: Technology is an enabling tool. It has limited intrinsic value other than our ability to use it. The Internet is perhaps the most profound example of such a tool. Our ability to apply technology at ever-greater speed, on an ever-widening and deepening scale, is a function of culture and personal learning. Without those two elements, nothing will happen. A tool lies dead in hands that won't use it. In those terms, organizational culture and personal learning are key to superior technology application.

LP: Can you talk about what you mean by integrating technology and learning processes? What tools have you employed to do this? How have you changed the way that teams work together and communicate?

JL: BP is fundamentally a knowledge-based company: We need to transfer knowledge and learning very quickly from one place in the company to another, and we have become pretty adept at this. I think, for example, of one of our engineers in Norway who found he was using a combination of drilling tools in an unusual way and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result. He put his idea on the BP intranet and the very next day it was read by his colleagues in Trinidad, who applied it and made the same gains.

Learning is done largely through bringing people together, and our technology makes that learning more efficient and effective. So we have web-based learning tools, self-service courses, chat rooms where information and best practices can be exchanged; and web-casting to bring teams together or to extend the benefits of our knowledge to other stakeholders—suppliers, for example, on whom we rely heavily to understand our needs more precisely. Again, there are any number of ways in which learning and technology are coming together to grow the knowledge base that is one of our principal assets.

LP: How do you and BP implement and manage organizational change?

JL: At BP, change is a way of life. In the past two years, we have been involved in eight major mergers and divestments. There are a few simple rules for leading and managing change. One, set targets. Two, put in place the leadership of the organization. Three, give those leaders clear accountabilities. The rest is largely in the detail.

LP: What are the qualities of an effective leader in the digital era? Do such leaders require different skills from those operating in more traditional work settings?

JL: The laws of economics, and of good business practice, have remained the same despite the advent of digital technology. An effective leader will never lose sight of those fundamentals. It's more important than ever, now, to be very outward-looking, continually scanning the horizon for opportunities and threats. It's also important to recognize that technology is enabling us to mine more deeply into our asset base, be they hard or knowledge assets, and reconfigure elements within it—all in new ways that unlock new sources of value. And finally, digital transformation means a lot of heavy lifting for the organization. So you have to be very clear about where you're going and what you might have to put up with along the way.

LP: What new models of collaboration are BP managers experimenting with? How is the organization inspiring and supporting creativity throughout its ranks?

JL: It's not creativity we're short of, it's our ability to convert creativity into new value. That's the challenge. BP's commitment to learning and collaboration predates digital technology by many years. BP has always believed in the value of networking and collaboration. So for us, the technology hasn't created new or unique models as such. What it has done, however, is make our existing models for organizational collaboration easier to drive and scale up.