People you can Trust: Nick Woodburn

In this series, we're giving you an insight into the people that make RockWave the trusted partner that keeps our clients coming back for more. They are the people you will work with on your seismic project, so it helps if you know something about them before you start. Break the ice, so to speak. Don't forget to collect your RockWaver bobble-head at the end.

1) What specifically about RockWave appealed to you, and what keeps you here?

“There is a satisfaction that comes from being a co-founder of RockWave. I am proud of what we created and the group of people we have put together. That is important for me, but the main reason I get out of bed in the morning is the data… working on the data and coming up with solutions to challenges. That is what I was trained to do. And we’re not short of challenges in the world of EHRS data are we?! Lots of it can be extremely challenging compared to the nice and stable airgun data we used to get routinely in the O&G world. At RockWave I’ve been able to get back on production projects, which I actually enjoy! I like the idea of trying to get things done as efficiently and, uh, effectively as possible. They also help me with idea generation.

“A lot of my best ideas come from being on production projects and trying to help other people solve stuff. You ask a few questions, start poking at how things are done, and that’s usually where a new concept or a new bit of technology comes from.”

2) On remote working

“I’m kind of the outlier in RockWave because I work out of a shared office. I just like having that separation between work and home, and I even like the commute, although it’s not much of a commute when it’s only a 30-minute walk. Being in a different space helps, because if my desk was at home I honestly wouldn’t know when to stop working.

“And then there’s the people side of it. Having the right characters, people who fit with the culture and don’t rub up against it too much, that really matters. Because we’re remote, you have to actually talk to each other properly. So things like monthly get-togethers and being on Teams with video, enforced through our “cameras-on” policy thing, that’s important to me. It just makes it feel more real and more connected.”

3) When you’re working on seismic projects, what does “doing a good job” mean in practice?

“We’ve got enough compute these days to move away from the old linear approach to processing. I’m an advocate for treating your processing sequence like a sound mixing desk. You know, like a sound engineer, he has maybe a guitarist coming through a certain channel and has a whole, like, vertical row of dials he can turn and he's listening to the immediate output effect of twisting any one particular dial. The impact on the end results is clear, right. And I like to think of processing should be like that. “You turn the Deghosting dial and quickly find out it’s impact on the migrated output. It’s all very well saying it looks nice after deghost, but that's not the end result, is it? We have enough compute these days to push data through migration to check the end result. Even better, would be to produce a fast-track sequence at the start of every project and demonsrate where the key challenges are going to be, then ensure the project allows sufficient time for optimising those steps.

“Also, picking back up on the MS Teams thing, client communication is a major part of doing a good job. I like to treat the client like a colleague, or rather, I treat myself as their in-house processing centre, right? This is all helped by MS Teams, which makes it feel just as if they're sitting next to me (like a colleague). In fact, right now in the top five chats I've used today, one of them is you! two of them are project related, like internal discussion forums, and two of them are clients. I’ll do quick sharing of screen grabs or ad-hoc video calls and it gets a dialogue going on, you know. Of course we’ve got the formal weekly meetings where everything is documented properly and all that, but this massively helps with communication and building a common understanding.”

4) Can you think of any standout examples of a time outside geophysics when you experienced exceptional service. 

“You’ve heard of love languages, right? Yeah, the old five being you can display and receive love by touch, words of affirmation, spending time with them, buying them gifts or doing acts of service. And mine is definitely acts of service. So I mean this recent example that I’m remembering really floated my boat.

“So I was at a music rehearsal at church one night, and it had gotten so cold during those two hours that cars I was expecting to have to de-ice my windscreen as I came back out to the car park. And I walk out the door and get to my car, only to find that someone who already left the rehearsal has already done it for me! No note or any indication on who had done it. Purely as an act of service, that wasn't necessary, but it was a simple yet incredible thing to do. And yeah, I mean, if we can, we can find the things in our business that is like a similar, to go above and beyond, it can really stick in the memory for all the right reasons.”

5) Desert Island Velocities: If you had a week of velocity picking on a desert island, what one audiobook or podcast and what one album/artist would you bring?

Podcast: Rest is History.

“This is a great one. I mean, the relationship between those two is brilliant, right? It just works. The fact that they can be so informative, knowledgeable but also humble enough to be silly, like doing a silly accent and messing it up. It's just funny.

Artist: Stevie Wonder/Mozart

“Well, I'm going to do it differently. So since joining RockWave, coming from a pure management role back into R&D and production projects, there's been the freedom to listen to music whilst working. There are two eras I’ve been getting into of late So I’m cheekily taking two choices! Firstly, I grew up in the 90s, and that meant that the 60s were “cool”, whereas the 70s were bobbins. In the same way as right now in the 2020s, the 90s are “cool”, but the noughties aren't (as confirmed by my daughters). So yeah, I've finally “discovered” the 70s. I didn't realise the 70s music was so good, but I take it back now. So 70s music would be ok for velocity picking and I’d go Stevie Wonder, however… I can't really listen to lyrics for the majority of work tasks because it's sort of too much of a distraction in your mind.

“So my second choice, if you’ll allow this! I got to the end of 2025 and Spotify gave you that. What's it called? Wrapped, that’s it. Yeah, my listening age was a grand total of 73! And when I told my kids that they almost wet themselves, yeah. And my number 1 artist… a data driven result from Spotify wrapped was… Mozart!”

Read Nick's RockWave profile here.