Scott Wolf
Job title: Founder & CEO
Short Biography
After a series of breakthrough projects in high school and college, I began my professional journey in projects in 1985 - 40 years ago.
That year, an "Entrepreneur 2000" workshop with Fernando Flores and a "Getting Things Done" workshop with David Allen (then called "Managing Accelerated Performance") launched me into a series of breakthrough projects requiring transformation and entrepreneurship. These were all in small and medium sized businesses, and included projects in landscaping, financial services, manufacturing, and more. But the majority of that time was spent opening six different restaurants.
Hoping to build a career in opening restaurants around the world, I earned my Master of Science degree in Hotel & Food Service Management in 1996.
But in 1997, I joined a 100-personal global consultancy, where I wound up on a very different path. Since 1999, I’ve worked closely with project leaders on more than a dozen large-scale capital project to SAFELY save billions of dollars in costs, cut years of time from schedules, and achieve a range of results that seemed beyond reach on LNG, Oil Sands, Deepwater, and Frontier projects.
These were major projects or megaprojects across the spectrum of oil & gas and mining industries, scattered around the globe. In every case, clients played the game on their terms, discovered talents they didn’t know they had, delivered results most thought unachievable, and frequently altered the trajectory of multiple careers, including their own.
In each case I worked with solid, proven project leaders with long track records of success, whose strong project management experience & skills were essential to their ambitions - essential, but not sufficient to tackle the magnitude of the challenge they accepted.
My success from 1985 until today has been driven by focusing relentlessly on asking, "what potential or possibility are you out to fulfill?"
Motivation
Fifty years ago, I was expelled from my 8th grade chemistry class in what should have been a relatively straightforward lecture on the laws of thermodynamics. While I had no problem with the laws, I did have a problem when the lecture became about how these laws made certain things impossible. I switched it around and said something to the effect of, "it would be more accurate to say that in order for X to be possible, it would seem to have to violate one of these laws." To paraphrase my next statements, based on this lecture, I couldn't tell if the limitation (impossible) was in the physics or simply in the way we talk about physics - i.e., in the language.
It wasn't my argument that got me expelled and given two days of after school detention. It was my disruptiveness. Twenty four other students who couldn't have cared less about my argument were waiting to go into the lab and do the day's chemistry experiment. But the experience embedded me in a lifelong question of the degree to which our possibilities and pursuits are limited by the languages in which we find ourselves embedded.
I do not seek to explain this, Instead, I assume - as a heuristic - that ALL limitations are linguistic in nature, and that the only limitation to achieving anything is linguistic or conversational. I don't consider this to be true, but rather a powerful place to stand. And I think the access to this is transforming our conversations. Understanding deeply the nature of language, linguistics, communication and conversation and the degree to which projects are merely networks of conversations.
In 40+ years of business I have never focused on managing people or managing projects, but rather on managing conversations. Conversations are the source code of any and every projects and enterprise. And what constantly amazes me is the difference that a slight alteration in a conversation can dramatically alter the outcomes. Nowhere does this seem to be more true than in large-scale projects.
Tweaking these trimtabs of project performance is my motivation. Watching large groups of people radically transform what's possible not by changing themselves, but by merely changing what they talk about or how they talk about it - that is my motivation.
Companies worked for
Worked for: JMW Consultants, SDI Communications, and Sunergos (now Lumeri, An Ankura Company).
Clients: For reasons of confidentiality, I cannot list names, but I've worked with people from more than 100 different companies. This includes almost all of the big Oil & Gas companies, as well as many of the engineering and construction companies (EPC company) that work on large-scale projects in oil & gas, energy, infrastructure, or mining.