Leadership Workshop Series
Digital Leadership for Operational Excellence in Energy
Operational excellence, the leadership pillars, and the three stages of digital work in the energy sector
Taught by Mr. Wilson Obeneme, Founder and CEO
Watch a 76-second preview
Why scanning a form is not the same as digitalising a process
What digitization, digitalization and digital transformation actually mean in an energy business, and how to move your own team through all three.
About this course
This course is built from a single GEPA leadership workshop on digital leadership and operational excellence. The speaker, an entrepreneur and consultant with an oil and gas operations background, argues that operational excellence in energy, meaning assets run safely, reliably and efficiently across lives that can stretch well past 25 years, now depends on how well an organisation captures, connects and uses its own data.
The heart of the session is a distinction most people collapse into a single word. Digitization converts paper and manual records into digital form. Digitalization uses digital technology to alter and optimise the processes that already exist. Digital transformation rethinks how the organisation runs, including its culture, its way of working and its business model. Each stage is walked through with examples drawn from operations, and learners are asked to place their own team honestly on that spectrum rather than claim a maturity they do not have.
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The second half deals with why digital work stalls in the energy sector: complexity, cost, and disruption to people who have run a working paper flow for twenty-five or thirty years. The answer offered is change management and design that starts from the user rather than from the expert. The speaker then walks through the operations platform his own team has built, using it as a worked illustration of the three stages, and the session closes with a short question and answer segment in which a participant describes introducing gas detectors as a piece of practical safety leadership.
It is written for working energy professionals, including operations and maintenance engineers, supervisors, consultants and entrepreneurs, who want a clear vocabulary for digital work and a realistic way to move a team forward from wherever it currently stands.
What you will be able to do
- Define operational excellence as the disciplined execution of safe, reliable and efficient operations
- Distinguish digitization, digitalization and digital transformation, and place any process in the right stage
- Map the leadership pillars used in the energy sector and locate digital leadership across them
- Diagnose why a digital initiative has stalled, using the barriers of complexity, cost and disruption
- Assess how far your own team or organisation has moved through the three stages
- Build a practical case for a digital reporting workflow, including where the time and cost savings come from
Who this course is for
- Operations and maintenance engineers in oil, gas, power and renewables
- Plant and facility supervisors who own daily and shift reporting
- Consultants and entrepreneurs selling into or buying digital tools for energy
- Managers running digital, performance or improvement programmes
- Mid-career professionals preparing for wider leadership responsibility
Curriculum
Course structure
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3 lessons
Module 1
Operational excellence and the leadership it demands
What operational excellence means for an energy asset, the five things that make someone a leader, and the leadership pillars the energy sector actually uses.
- Why operational excellence matters in energy Free preview 5 minutes
- The five marks of a leader 3 minutes
- The leadership pillars of the energy sector 3 minutes
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3 lessons
Module 2
The three stages of digital leadership
Digitization, digitalization and digital transformation defined and separated, with worked examples and an honest self-assessment.
- Digital leadership, and stage one: digitization 3 minutes
- Stage two: digitalization 4 minutes
- Stage three: digital transformation, and where you actually stand 6 minutes
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3 lessons
Module 3
Why digital initiatives stall in the energy sector
The barriers the speaker's team found in practice, namely complexity, cost and disruption, and the design and change-management response to them.
- Complexity and cost as barriers 3 minutes
- Disruption, change management and the language of resistance 2 minutes
- Build for the user, not for the expert 4 minutes
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2 lessons
Module 4
The three stages in a working system
A walkthrough of the operations platform the speaker's team built, used as an illustration of what the three stages look like in practice, and where the savings come from.
- From paper reporting to mobile capture 5 minutes
- Connected workflows, AI insight and the business case 5 minutes
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2 lessons
Module 5
Applying it: reflection and questions
The host's challenge to run the leadership traits through every pillar, a participant's safety case, and the questions the group put to the speaker.
- Turning the pillars into your own vision 5 minutes
- Safety leadership in practice, and the closing charge 4 minutes