A Day Of Lecture and Facilitation

I have often mentioned in my past write-ups that I have commitments to address at my previous place of work. These commitments had been in various forms, some were just consultations, some were talks and dialogue sessions, some lectures and facilitations. Others were audits of activities and performance, situational assessments and reviews, skill development schemes and so on. In a nutshell all were to do with human behaviours. All would demand my experience recall. They have been interesting, invigorating and reminiscing opportunities for me. There is a saying that if you enjoy your work and what you do you will not work a day in your life. To that, I have not been working at all since I retired.

A few days ago I facilitated a session where the participants were new employees, some young and fresh university graduates while some others not so young having had varied working experiences elsewhere. There were 46 of them altogether. The topic of my lecture and facilitation was ‘Introduction to the Downstream Oil and Gas Activities’. It is an information type of facilitation consisting of half-a-day lecture and half-a-day group work. The content of the lecture was mainly on the utilization of hydrocarbon and how it is reconstituted to form the various products in the downstream of the oil and gas industry.

To concentrate on how hydrocarbon is reconstituted, refined, broken down and to continually talk about the chemistry of hydrocarbon would make it very dull for the participants. As the participants are of different backgrounds and disciplines like, finance, HR, security and others, to make the lecture interesting is indeed a challenge. I found that whenever I go into the chemistry of it many of the participants will have blank stares as though they look through me into outer space. It’s as though I talk about alien things. Of course there are those who had strong chemistry background and would knowingly respond to me and I would then take the opportunity to get them involved in the presentation as well. Otherwise I would intersperse my presentations with real life examples and analogies or related stories and experiences that I went through in my years in oil and gas.

I am no politician and where politics is concerned I tend to stand aside and watch the happenings but I noticed that when I tag on current politics to the oil and gas scene, whether local or overseas, there was interest amongst the majority of participants and at times the discussion became lively. Of course I steered clear of being specific, of indicating alienation to any political group, by generalizing always but I do note that amongst the young minds there was the tendency of them looking at current things negatively. I don’t commit myself to any side and would leave the discussion hanging for the participants to think for themselves. My objective was to interestingly present the message of oil and gas to the participants, in any way that could easily be understood, and that’s the core. Anything additional on the sides I consider fringes to spice up the presentation, nothing more……… May the Almighty be pleased......

MKI Ramblings Unlimited
Petaling Jaya