THE INTELLIGENT OILFIELD LEADERSHIP PROGRAMME
Leadership that closes the loop.
10 Sessions · 25 Minutes Per Day · Two Weeks · Free · For leaders in Nigeria’s oil and gas sector
Hello — I am Coach Ritchie. I am the AI assistant for this programme. Ritchie Wingo built me, and your work is marked against the rubric he published; anything that falls below the mark to continue, he reviews himself, because that is the point at which a person needs help rather than a score. I am here for the moments in between, when the steering committee meets on Monday and you want to argue a point through with someone first.
Ten sessions, twenty-five minutes a day, two weeks. An oilfield produces through the interaction of geology, wells, equipment, people and commercial arrangements, and the operator and the service company each hold a different fragment of the same truth. AI becomes useful when leadership understands those interactions and assigns responsibility for acting on the evidence.
Every assignment is about your company and one real decision in it, and every assignment comes back with a written letter: what holds up and why, and where something is thin, exactly where to look. By Session 10 you will hold a signed first-year operating programme for your company.
Ask me anything as you work and I will help you think it through, but I will not write your plan for you, I do not give investment, legal or engineering advice, and I switch myself off while you sit a quiz or an exam.
There is nothing to buy and no licence key to redeem. You sign in with your Google account so that your work can be marked and returned to you, your progress page follows you between devices, and your certificate can be issued in your own name.
With your Google account. Name, email, the company you work for and your role — that is the whole enrolment.
Leadership that closes the loop. Name your company, your side of the operator–contractor relationship, and one decision whose loop you will map.
Twenty-five minutes, then one written assignment. It is marked against a published rubric and comes back as a letter.
You assemble and sign your ninety-day plan, sit the final, and your certificate is issued.
Already started? Open my progress page → · Just looking? Read Week 1 →
This programme assumes you are not a data scientist and do not intend to become one. It ends with you able to demand that a model answers a defined question, uses information available at decision time, beats a credible alternative and stays within its limits — and that a benefit claim separates what was observed from what is estimated.
Begin with the constraint, build a decision portfolio, and keep operating results apart from incentives.
Define the observation before the model, preserve missingness, and design the operator and contractor exchange.
A credible alternative, an abstention policy, evaluation that matches deployment, and intervals read honestly.
Subsurface, reservoir, drilling, production, reliability, integrity and digital twins — each tied to an action.
Tenders, quotes, mobilisation, execution evidence, job economics and reports that teach.
Prediction is not protection; obligations as controlled records; Nigerian capability made measurable.
Retrieval built around authority, bounded tools, security and a planned model lifecycle.
The investment case with its counterfactual, roles and adoption, and a first-year programme paced by evidence.
| It is written for | It is not written for |
|---|---|
| Managing directors and executives of oilfield operators and asset owners | Engineers looking for model-building or coding work — that is a different course |
| Leaders of oilfield service companies and contractors — operations, business development, finance and HSE together | Anyone looking for engineering, legal or regulatory advice on a specific asset or contract |
| Technical directors, asset managers and maintenance, integrity and production leaders | Anyone wanting a certificate without writing about a real company |
| Assurance, information-security and commercial leaders who must test what an AI claim is worth | Anyone expecting twenty minutes of video and a pass |
This programme does not end in a folder of notes. In Session 1 you name your company, its side of the operator–contractor relationship, and one decision whose loop you will map, and every session after that writes one section of a single document — your First-Year AI Operating Programme — around it. By Session 10 you assemble and sign it. Written properly, it is the paper you table at your next executive committee or board meeting.
| Week | Sections you write |
|---|---|
| Week 1 Leadership, Foundations and Intelligence in the Oilfield | 1. Section 1 — Our company, our side of the operator–contractor relationship, and the one decision whose loop we will map. 2. Section 2 — Our binding constraint, decision portfolio and field data contract. 3. Section 3 — The credible alternative, the model task, the abstention policy and the evaluation design. 4. Section 4 — Where subsurface, reservoir or drilling intelligence changes an action in our business, and what information is worth buying. 5. Section 5 — Our field application: the system it optimises, the alert policy, the integrity evidence and degraded operation. |
| Week 2 The Service Company, Trust and Delivery | 6. Section 6 — Our tender, quote and mobilisation decisions and the controls they need. 7. Section 7 — From plan to collected cash: our execution evidence, job economics and reporting discipline. 8. Section 8 — Our protection boundary, our obligations as controlled records, and measurable Nigerian capability. 9. Section 9 — Our generative-AI bounds, lifecycle controls and investment case. 10. The assembled, signed First-Year AI Operating Programme. |
This programme is free, and nothing is upsold to you inside it. When you finish, you receive an ERW CommandOilfield certificate of completion in your own name — issued on a pass, not on attendance.
| To receive it | What that means |
|---|---|
| Every assignment passed | Sessions 1 to 9, each marked at 70 or above against its published rubric. Work below the mark comes back with what to fix; resubmit and the new mark replaces the old one. |
| The capstone passed | Your signed First-Year AI Operating Programme, Session 10, marked at 70 or above. |
| The Final Exam passed | Fifteen questions, three of them rebuilt from your own earlier mistakes, at 70 or above. |
The certificate is emailed to the Google address you signed in with. It certifies completion of an ERW leadership programme; it is not a professional licence, an engineering qualification or a university award.
Only people who have finished the programme can write one — the Session 10 capstone passed and the marked Final passed, both recorded by the server rather than by anyone’s say-so. They are shown exactly as written, never solicited and never edited.
One session a day, twenty-five minutes. Each one teaches part of the doctrine and makes you use it on your own company.
Every session ends in a written assignment — a decision map, a data contract, an evaluation design, a plan section. Four hundred to nine hundred words.
Against the rubric printed under the assignment. A written letter comes back, usually within minutes.
Session 10 assembles nine sections into one document, then the final exam — three of whose questions are rebuilt from your own mistakes.
No mystery, and no waiting days for a mark. Here is the whole loop.
One document per session — Word or Google Docs — with the first line reading Session: N. Your own company, your own numbers.
Against that session’s published rubric, criterion by criterion. The same rubric every time, for everybody.
Not a score — a letter naming what holds up, what is asserted without evidence, and exactly where to look to fix it.
Your mark joins your progress page and the corrected section goes into your plan, so Session 10 is assembly rather than writing.
An illustration of the letter format, using Session 3’s real rubric.
| Criterion | Awarded |
|---|---|
| Describes the credible alternative concretely enough to be measured | 24 / 25 |
| States the task with its timing, and links the output to an explicit decision policy | 19 / 20 |
| Gives a distinct response and responder for each abstention condition | 20 / 25 |
| Designs evaluation that matches deployment, with workload and separate evidence for prediction, transfer and causal effect | 16 / 30 |
Two weeks. Five sessions a week, twenty-five minutes each, at whatever pace your diary allows. Every session ends in one written assignment about your own company, and every assignment becomes a section of your ninety-day plan.
Five papers, marked the moment you submit, every question returned with the reasoning behind it. Two pop quizzes of five questions, two practice exams of fifteen, and a fifteen-question final. You are never left to guess when to sit one: the session that opens a paper says so, prints the paper beside its assignment, and flags itself on the session tab — and your progress page always names the paper due now. Closed book, no notes, and Coach Ritchie switches himself off while you sit one. Pass mark 70 — and you may resit the practice papers as often as you like.
5 questions · after Session 3
15 questions · after Session 5, closing Week 1
5 questions · after Session 8
15 questions · after Session 9, before the final
15 questions · in Session 10
Nine sections written one per session, assembled and signed in Session 10: the decision whose loop you mapped, its data contract, the model and its evaluation, the field and service decisions it touches, its safety and regulatory boundaries, its controls and investment case — laid out across the first year.
The Intelligent Oilfield and Oilfield Services — An Operating Doctrine for AI in Nigerian Oilfield Operations and Services. A reader toolkit and twenty-four chapters across five parts: leadership and trustworthy foundations; intelligence in the oilfield; the intelligent oilfield service company; trust, safety and controlled intelligence; and capital, adoption and executive delivery. It treats the operator and the contractor as one operating system, because each holds a different fragment of the same truth.
These 10 sessions teach the doctrine and make you use it. The book carries what twenty-five minutes cannot: every chapter in full, eight appendices — decision records, technical model specifications, eight worked decision models, operating playbooks, executive review questions, a glossary, advanced validation methods and an integrated operator and contractor exercise — and the source list behind its legal and technical references.
Nothing in this programme depends on buying it. Every session, paper and certificate is free whether you own the book or not.
The whole programme on one printable page — the six tools, the five permissions, the evidence standard and the first-year programme. Keep it beside you from Week 1.
The document every assignment is written in — opens in Word or Google Docs, with the first line already correct.
Read the first session before you sign in, and decide for yourself whether the rest is worth two weeks.
Your marks, your letters, your plan sections and your paper results, in one place.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is it really free? | Yes. No card, no key, no paid tier. The certificate is free too. The book is available separately for anyone who wants the full chapters, figures and sources, and nothing in the programme depends on it. |
| How much time, honestly? | Twenty-five minutes of reading and thirty to sixty minutes of writing per session. Call it five to eight hours over two weeks, and rather more if you do the capstone properly. |
| Do I need a technical background? | No. The technical sessions teach you what to ask, not how to build. You need a real company, a real decision, and the willingness to look at both honestly. |
| Is this specific to oil and gas? | Yes. It is written for Nigeria’s oilfield operators and service companies. Every session sets an operator case beside a service-company case, because the two hold different fragments of the same truth. |
| Is this investment or legal advice? | No. It is an operating doctrine for leaders. Figures and regulator facts are taught only as the book states and sources them. |
| Can my leadership team do it together? | Yes, and it works better that way — but each person signs in and submits their own work, because the plan is only useful if it is argued over. |
| What if I miss a week? | Nothing happens. There are no cohort dates and no deadlines. Your progress waits for you. |
| Who marks it? | It is marked against R. Wingo’s published rubric, criterion by criterion, the same way every time. Anything that comes out below the mark to continue, he reviews himself before it reaches you. Coach Ritchie helps you think; he does not mark and he does not write your plan. |