Since the oil price downturn of 2014, operators globally have made impressive strides to improve operational performance across production, cost, and safety, while managing energy efficiency. However, over the past two years, as an industry, improvement has largely stopped and even reversed in some cases. Using insights developed from McKinsey’s proprietary surveys and direct support to E&Ps of all scales, we see a large variation in operator behaviors. We will visit these trends and explore the practices and approaches, some challenging conventional wisdom, that set leading operators apart from the rest.