ONS asks for courage – here is where we have seen it

At ONS 2026, the theme is courage. We would add one thing: courage gets you started, resilience is what lets you follow through, and neither is much use on its own.

For some leaders, courage means backing a new direction when the business case is still evolving. For others, it means starting before every data challenge has been solved. Sometimes it means staying on the course years after the pilot is over, when the real work of scaling begins.

The conversations Falkor will bring to ONS this year sit at different points on that line. Falkor CEO Shane McArdle will join leaders from Yara International and Vår Energi to discuss two very different transformation journeys. At our booth, visitors will also hear directly from Norske Shell about what daily use looks like once a program has been running for years.

Across these sessions, resilience is what turns a courageous decision into a lasting one.

Earlier this month our CEO sat down with Oscar Abbink of S&P Global to talk about exactly that: digitalization to build resilience during a genuine supply crisis. One thing from that conversation has stayed with us: the companies coping best right now are the ones who did the unglamorous work years earlier – capturing expertise and knowledge, trusting the data, and putting it in the reach of people on the shift.

Courage is committing before the business case can prove itself.

Yara International committed to a digital transformation program across major production sites in Norway and the Netherlands without waiting for every question around short-term return to be answered.

In fertilizer production, that is harder than it sounds – you do not get to fail fast, so leadership chose to build capability and learn through deployment. Today, the platform supports more than 300 active users, and is still growing.

Courage is letting someone else see your data.

Fragmented data is still one of the biggest barriers to collaboration in this industry, and the standard response is to wait for better data before moving forward. That wait often turns into a decision never to start.

Vår Energi started instead – with one asset, a focused use case, real operational data, and operator and supplier working together in an environment where critical information was spread across multiple systems. That first step created enough confidence to go further.

Courage is measured a year, five years, and ten years later.

The real test comes later – is anyone still using it years on?

Norske Shell represents a later chapter in the same story. Today, their program includes intelligent workflows for maintenance planning, risk management, and remote operations. It all started with one asset and one use case.

Seen together, these three stories trace different but equally effective paths:

• Deciding to move before the numbers are settled.

• Working with imperfect information instead of waiting for better conditions.

• Scaling technology for daily use and delivering value because people stayed with it.

So yes, courage, and also what ONS says it is for: a more resilient society.

Most resilient organizations can point back to a moment when they chose to move before certainty arrived.

 

These are the stories we want to share in Stavanger. Meet us there.