Culture Shock!

I went up to Fort MacMurray, Alberta last week to co-facilitate a course for Franklin Covey titled "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" for Suncor Energy. I and a number of other "Suncorians" flew up on Monday night. I was told in advance by my contact at Suncor that there were no hotel rooms anywhere to be found in the City, so I would be staying in the Suncor apartments. This turned out to be just the beginning of my culture shock.

I knew Fort MacMurray was booming. We've all seen it and heard it in the news almost daily. But to see it first hand was an eye-opening experience. My rental vehicle was a large SUV, they didn't have cars. In fact, I don't remember seeing many cars - all trucks, larger trucks and bigger trucks. I got stuck in rush hour. Rush hour? In Fort MacMurray? I had a total of 15 kms to travel. This took me almost 40 minutes. And when I finally got to my turn, I found the very first three lane left turn lane I have ever seen. The apartment was great - rather new, four stories, large. My co-facilitator Linda came to take me to dinner to get to know each other and to finalize arrangements for the workshop. When she arrived she told me that the building I was staying in didn't exist three weeks ago. We ate dinner at Boston Pizza. I found out later it was the highest grossing BP in all of Canada. And the other BP downtown was second.

Later that night I was treated by the locals to several games of "who's truck (or Harley) is louder" through to about 2:30 a.m. I didn't get much sleep as a result. I picked Linda up on the way to the workshop. We left 40 minutes early to go 12 kms, just in case. Linda was originally from Ontario. Her and her family had been in Fort Mac for 27 years. She's seen it all. She educated me on everything from the booming economy to the lack of infrastructure to the local volunteer scene and where to go to watch birds, one of her favorite pastimes.

Linda enlightened me on Suncor. She had worked there for years but was now semi-retired. She understood their culture well. She put up a world map at the door and asked participants to put a dot where they were from. I knew Canada was multi-cultural, but what I saw amazed even me. We had 21 participants and only a small number were actually from Canada. There were several other countries represented including Newfoundland:). What impressed me most about the workshop other than the quality of people was the fact that there were two spouses and two community members also in the course. This doesn't sound unusual on the surface, but I found out that Suncor pays for these folks to attend the workshop. Very impressive.

Overall the experience was a lot of fun. Amazing town and amazing people. I couldn't help but wonder how long the boom will last and what will happen as a result.

Ken