Branding the Energy / Oil / Gas Industry: Shell Oil and Scenario Planning
When it comes to carrying out your global branding, communications and design, gkBRAND has years of experience working with energy companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Shell LPG, Mobil, Kazak Oil, Sithe Energy and NY Power Authority.

When we had the privilege of working with Royal Dutch Shell on global branding projects, we met with their people at the Shell headquarters in London and later in Paris at the Shell subsidiary Butagaz. I came to know and really respect and admire their top-notch quality and highly informed and sophisticated professionalism.

What particularly interested me about Shell’s way of conducting business around the world is their scenario planning – a very sophisticated approach to addressing changing times. The key idea of this methodology is that it is not possible to forecast or control the future. As I have discussed in my other articles, the 12-principle methodology we use at gkBRAND says: Everything is constantly in a state of flux. If we resist change and try to build concrete barricades or rigid ideas, we end up in a painful state of shattered hopes and dreams. In that case, fancy business planning goes out the window. Or, we can embrace the constantly changing world in a fluid fashion and develop ways to “dance with the flow.” This is what Shell has done through scenario planning. They think ahead creatively about all the possible scenarios, and they prepare and flow with change. Scenario planning has been around for decades, but because of the sophistication it has taken at Shell Oil and the tremendous results they have achieved, I’d like to share some of its principles with you.

My friend Adam Kahane, who worked on the Shell scenario planning team, has documented some of these amazing results in his writings. According to Adam, if you can forecast the future, and you were conceited enough to think you knew what was going to happen, it would lead you to a “tunnel vision” that would be destined to fail.

The scenario approach inquires and looks deeply and broadly into everything that is going on right now and then constructs a number of scenarios about how things might turn out in the future, based on that deep inquiry.

These scenarios about the future are then used to explore how the company may decide to function if any one of the scenarios were to occur. What is important here is for the company to learn to skillfully use company resources to best deal with any future situation. This stretches executives to think beyond what is normally feasible with the usual way of processing information and reacting. Adam says it is about “building the capacity for the company to learn.”

When you put the right teams together and get them to stretch their minds and imaginations, to see what is not obvious, you have to go on learning journeys – out to the field, into nature, through travel and exploration, so you can see the unexpected. Learning is key to this approach. You just can’t gather executives in a board room with a bunch of PowerPoint presentations and say, “OK, fellows, now we are going to play this game and develop some scenarios.” This approach would be too limiting, and few creative ideas would flow from it. Instead, the emphasis must be on the organization’s ability to learn and grow.

In the book, Meetings with Remarkable Men, G.I. Gurdjieff talks about his journeys of learning through travels to many interesting places and meetings with remarkable people who were experts in diverse fields of knowledge and had glimpses of what was going on in remote parts of the world. Consulting with remarkable people is key to an organization’s growth and knowledge building, for business, academia, science, for spiritual and environmental people and for writers and philosophers. Shell Oil has been doing this for years now and it really shows.

Pierre Wack developed the idea of using scenarios as a strategic planning tool at Shell back in 1985. This helped Shell to think the unthinkable about the future of the company’s business, the energy industry and the politics of the world. It taught Shell managers new ways to see the future, especially unexplored futures.

Through scenario planning, Shell was able to foresee the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Empire, even the peaceful ending of apartheid in South Africa which Shell’s scenario team lead by Adam Kahane played a big role in.

Adam also says that scenarios are always plurals, where predictions are singular. Scenarios present unthinkable stories about the plausible future, while resisting the human inclination to perceive only one version of the future. It puts a lot of responsibility in the hands of the participants to dig deep and educate themselves to avoid the pitfall of seeing only one way and trying to impose their view on the rest. A shared vision of an unforeseen and desirable future can be a powerful weapon to change.

By Vásken Kalayjian