6
Next Steps
You’ve got a body of work here that’s substantial, important, consequential, and meaningful. So the question is … how are we to move forward on this?
—Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard (retired), closing remarks at Offshore Situation Room (OSR)
In the final session of the event, three members of the Gulf Research Program (GRP) leadership team provided their thoughts on what they observed during the event and opportunities moving forward:
- Lauren Alexander Augustine, Executive Director of the GRP
- David Daniel, Chair of the GRP Division Committee1
- Richard Sears, Chair of the GRP Gulf Offshore Energy Safety Board (GOES)
James Pettigrew, Director of the GRP GOES, served as the moderator for this final session. Pettigrew began by asking for the panel’s thoughts about what occurred over the past 3 days and possible opportunities moving forward. Augustine’s response included the following remarks:
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1 This committee provides oversight and direction for the GRP.
In some of my groups, there was some reference to historical and long-standing mistrust across different silos of the communities that we actually have gathered here in the OSR. And I’m hopeful, very hopeful, that we can start to erode that mistrust and build trust among us, because I think that what we heard, whether we divided by game, or by [stakeholder] community, or how we identify, we heard some really common themes ... around collaboration, around preparedness, around building up the resilience, around better communication…. These are all pieces of the fabric of GRP. As we think about moving forward … we do want to work with everybody that we can in this landscape, and we want to pull from the best and weave a stronger braid from lots of different strands coming in.
In turn, Daniel stated the following:
The major themes that we spend so much time talking about within the GRP Division [Committee] I think well reflected the areas of conversation that we heard: community resilience, preventing oil spills, response, the need to engage local communities, the challenges of education.
However, Daniel did identify some areas for additional attention, such as cybersecurity. More broadly, he noted that “the GRP needs to think about how we can address [the] complexity issue in our work because it is, I think, one of the most challenging aspects of how we respond.” Sears built on Daniel’s comments on complexity:
Complexity is a tough thing because these are very difficult, multidisciplinary, complex problems. And they do need to be attacked in specific ways, and trying to find a simplifying theme for them, or a way to boil them down to their essential elements, is good. But … if you want to solve complex problems and do it right and do it well, you’ve got to make them as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Sears noted that much of what led to BP’s trouble with the Deepwater Horizon disaster was oversimplifying a complex system of people, processes, and nature. He also commented on the value of GOES’s expertise to avoid oversimplifying challenges. When asked by Pettigrew if they were surprised that there were common themes across these groups, all three panelists answered “no.” Daniel added, however, that the groups came up with nuanced approaches to those common themes. Sears attributed this nuance to how OSR was structured:
The 3 days took these different crosscuts through the problem by dissecting the problem into its pieces: preparedness, response, restoration, and then also dissecting the people into different communities who they represent, but also different aspects of their expertise, whether it be engineering, technology, or regulation, or whatever. And so we were coming at it from so many different directions. And it was comforting in many ways that we landed on a lot of these themes—but then also great that because we were seeing it from so many angles, we were seeing the complexity of them and getting the different perspectives.
Augustine stated that she was “delighted” by the overlap of topics because it reinforced to her that despite coming from different points of view and experiences, “we are all in this together.”
Throughout the remainder of the session, the trio touched on a few other topics:
- Funding. Sears emphasized the importance of addressing funding support. Specifically, he noted that when talking about developing and implementing new technologies, participants in his Needs and Planning Game group raised the question, “Who is going to pay for it?” Another participant added that even when funding is available, initiatives compete for attention. Thus, he suggested considering how to garner attention successfully for the highest-priority actions identified at OSR. Daniel pointed out that one unique aspect of the GRP is its stable funding for the next 20-plus years. Because many entities are at the mercy of their budget cycles, one role the GRP attempts to fill is addressing areas that require greater continuity.
- Incentives. As Daniel noted, “I heard the word incentivize over and over and over again.” One takeaway for him was the question, “What can GRP do to incentivize, either by convening or serving as a mechanism to encourage people to work together?” Later in the session, Sears returned to the topic of incentives, commenting that if the GRP can convene the right people to develop ideas and move the technology forward in some fashion, it provides an incentive to others to bring it into use.
One of the last questions for the session was, “How best can the broad collection of people here continue to stay engaged with each other, with the GRP …, and with the problem?” Regarding the GRP, Augustine noted its recent growth (it now has five boards) and encouraged everyone to go
to the GRP website2 and connect with the program leads. Regarding the OSR participants, she commented on her openness to hearing people’s suggestions, “because I think this is a really wonderful community that we’re hopefully starting to build.”
Augustine drew the event to a close by thanking the planning committee members, support staff, participants, and guests.
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2 The GRP website can be found at https://www.nationalacademies.org/gulf/gulfresearch-program.
