How to Tell If a Decision Is Good Before You See the Outcome with Christopher Donaleski | Ep 359

Oil and Gas Upstream

In this episode, Christopher Donaleski discusses the critical need for validating decisions before observing their outcomes, particularly in

Key takeaways

• Christopher Donalski emphasizes a 'people and process first' approach to prevent automating inefficient or bad workflows.
• The '4A' framework (Assess, Apply, Delete, Automate/Accelerate) provides a method for evaluating technological implementation.

Main topics

• AI decision-making frameworks
• Organizational change management

Notable quotes

We have solutions that are looking for problems.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a guide for leaders to navigate rapid technologi

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:03) Oil and gas production is the union of natural systems with advanced science and complex engineering. Smart people across the globe create this remarkable place we call Upstream, and each day brings a new challenge. This is the Oil and Gas Upstream podcast, where we look at how these systems come together and learn from the people who make it happen. Speaker 5 (0:29) Welcome. to Oil & Gas Upstream. I'm Elena Milchert, your host. Some of you know me as the former director for Oil & Gas Upstream Research at the U.S. Department of Energy. I retired from the DOE, founded Energy of Consulting, and joined the Oil & Gas Global Network as a podcast host. We're recording here in person at the Energy Drone and Robotics Conference 2026, and it's just so exciting here to see all of the robots, all of the drones, big and small. It's just been too exciting for words. And of course, you know I'm at the edge of my understanding about this AI space. I'm really excited. We actually have a subject matter expert here with us today. So now let me introduce my guest. We have Christopher Donaleski. He's the founder of AI Advisory Group, and he's the creator of The Validated Mind. And he has just had some wonderful presentations here, both individually and as part of panels. So that's why I say he's a subject matter expert in a place that I am very new to. And so I'm going to be asking him. asking him lots of great questions. Christopher, thank you for joining us today. Thank you Speaker 1 (1:32) so much for having me. Speaker 5 (1:33) Oh, absolutely. Well, I've been bragging about you, so tell us a little bit about your background. Speaker 1 (1:37) Yeah, absolutely. So I have a pretty interesting background, I think. Back in 2012 was when I kind of entered the oil and gas sector. And, you know, I was walking through the pipe yards and working with different inspection companies through agencies. And I was working in quality management systems. So I was working as an API Q1 auditor, as ISO 9001 auditor. as a quality management inspection for companies like Exxon, MacMoran, Shell, and Chevron. Keeping Speaker 5 (2:03) us safe and on point. Excellent. That's right. That's right. Great. And tell us about your companies. How did you get to found AI Advisory Group? And what is the Validated Mind? And you also have a book. Speaker 1 (2:14) Absolutely. It's one of those things that I think people end up getting into. I feel like sometimes I wonder how I got here myself. I know. And I'm like, what decision did I make at what point in the road that I decided to take? this one versus another one. And I always fell into the idea that things could be better than they are. Whether I was working oil and gas, I was working in telecommunications before that. I was always working in an area that people said, hey, you're doing something, you're seeing something different, you're making improvements. how do you do this? And not only how do you do this, but can you do more of it? And I kept on saying yes. And I think over time saying yes too many times, you know, got me into the place I am now, which I'll kind of maybe start where I am now. And I'll kind of trickle, maybe reverse engineer that so you can kind of understand that. Speaker 5 (2:59) Sure, sure. But it occurs to me that you're spending your time inspecting and validating and almost enforcing in a space that's really critical to the industry, that if that did not influence your thoughts about things could be done better or whatever, whatever, based on what you saw. Is that fair? Speaker 1 (3:16) Yeah, no, it absolutely is. And I think that one of the things that it always, so there's two aspects or perspectives that I think I could bring to the table here that makes more sense. One is I would always be presented with a technology problem. A need, a technology need? Well, I'll say a technology problem. It was, we're using this technology A. It could be as simple as we're using Excel, we're using emails, right? We're using a somewhat hodgepodge of a ERP system or a bunch of software that we're using. And no one either knows how to use it or that no one knows how to use it properly, or it was adopted halfway in an organization, or you have project-specific tools. I Speaker 5 (3:54) think we all have experienced that. 100%. Speaker 1 (3:56) And what I realized is over... the last 15 years of spending time in not just the inspection side, not in just the project management side, but in the emerging tech side, I would always be brought in to find, hey, this is new technology. Let's go figure out what we can do with it. I quickly realized that we have solutions that are looking for problems. And we have technology problems that the companies think that they're technology problems. But in reality, they're a people problem. They're a process problem. And it's a problem problem. And what I mean by that is that you have to understand the problem, the real one, not the one that people think it is, but the actual underlying problem and how to solve for that. And if you do that, then you can say, OK, now I can figure out where my solutions are, what makes sense, what's a good fit. And I can then figure out what the buy-in needs to be, what the adoption cycle looks like, what's hype versus real. And that's a huge component of what's made me successful over the years of being able to come into organizations, working from finance to operations to HR and solving some very real problems for companies very quickly. Because I said, you know what, we need to look at technology last. Let's look at people in process first. And decisions, and we'll get into that in a minute, but decisions became a very big piece of that puzzle. Speaker 5 (5:08) So people and processes first, because you're retrofitting, I guess, the situation with some new technology or whatever, and the interface between the people and the technology is probably going to be rougher if you don't have a real sense of your people and your processes as context for this new application. Speaker 1 (5:26) Yeah, no, I think that's fair. And I think that I work with a lot of vendors in the sense of they always ask me, like, how do I get in front of customers more? How do I get to the decision maker? Right. Everybody wants me to get to the decision maker. And then they look at going through champions and trying to figure out who has a problem. The reality is, is larger companies, the enterprise companies, everybody has the same problem. They're different scales of the same problem. Right. In a small company is that they have to have the same problem, the same budget, the same issues that come up. And it has to be emotional attachment to saying this can be solved. now. So it's more about timing than it is anything else. And it's also about trying to get someone to trust you to come in to solve the problem. In an enterprise level company, it's so hard to get to the decision maker because the decision maker could be someone that actually is resolving a operational problem, but it might be a... CFO or CEO that has to approve that. They're so disconnected. And I don't mean this like in a negative way, but they just naturally by their job is different. So they're disconnected from the actual problem. They don't see they have a different relationship with that problem. It's very difficult for you to go in there and say, technology, I'm going to go to the vendor. The vendor says they can do all these things. And the vendor says, we can do all these things. But what really happens is they don't look at all of the, what is the real problem? Because no one wants to talk about the real problem. It's a pride because of ego. because of all the behavioral science on how we make decisions. When Speaker 5 (6:47) you think about being sick and you go to the doctor and you tell them all your symptoms first, but they're not 100 % sure what you've got. They just... Don't want you to die. And they fix things along the way. And if you get healed along the way, that's even better. But we don't know everything. We don't know anything almost. Speaker 1 (7:05) You're absolutely right. There's a 4A process that we like to work with on clients. And how we do that is there's four A's, which is assess, as you talked about, right? Going to a doctor, you're going to get an assessment, right? You're going Speaker 5 (7:15) to Speaker 1 (7:15) figure out, what are you trying to accomplish here? What's the issue? Like, is it your knee hurts? Is it your head hurts? Like, and a lot of people, what they do is they go in and Google a bunch of stuff. Like, I'm dying. And it's like, well, no, you're not. dying and it might be your head, but it might be your foot, but maybe your foot's causing your head to hurt. Who knows, right? But the reality is we don't know until we assess a problem. Now we go in and once we do that, there might be diagnostics that are a part of that. There might be go, you know, you go get MRIs or CAT scans or x-rays or whatever it may be. So depending on what is needed, you're going to look at the experts to decide what that is. But so many people will look at generalizing this or going and do their own research. We see this in AI a lot right now where people are just getting going to chat GPT or any other of the chat bot. out there, whether it's Anthropic or whether it's Gemini or Grok or anything else. And what they're doing is they're just getting the average best answer. But that doesn't actually help anything because what they're doing is they're saying, okay, well, this might be without having context is really hard to understand. And without having an expert, it's very difficult to understand the discernment and understanding what you're trying to accomplish and what you try to do. The second one is apply and delete. So delete is really important. And I put delete in there because you can't just apply things, but a lot of times it's what you don't look at. So like if you're x-raying, if you're saying I have a left knee is hurting, could you x-ray the right knee so you'd have comparison? Maybe. Is it beneficial? I don't know. That would be an expert to decide. Right. But if we're Speaker 5 (8:36) going Speaker 1 (8:36) to x-ray the entire body, maybe that's a little over. So maybe if that's a part of Speaker 5 (8:40) the Speaker 1 (8:40) process, maybe that's a bad process and we need to delete that process out of that. And then the two at the end are automate and accelerate. That's the order that people typically go in. But you need to accelerate before you automate. And that's one of Speaker 5 (8:52) the Speaker 1 (8:52) key components that I see right now in organizations. Speaker 5 (8:54) So what are we meaning by accelerate? Speaker 1 (8:56) It's more efficiency, right? So how do you actually get better? It used to be like, what was it? A good, fast and cheap. Yes. Pick two. Okay, right. And I think that we live in a world now where you can actually get all three. Now, depending on your markets, depending