I recently read two presentations on decision taking (and why not
decision making?) and long term thinking in a changing society
(delivered in Berlin 2005) by Arie
de Geus who is widely regarded as having pioneered scenario planning
as a commercial process (with his colleague Pierre Wack).
Arie headed up Shell’s scenario and business planning division. He
is legend. As a matter of interest, any of you who have read Joe Jaworksy’s
Synchronicity
will know Joe joined Shell to head scenario planning.
Shell is probably
one of the few truly Level VII players and as a result of that does interesting
things. In 2008 when I was looking at the Working Journey of James
Lovelock (an independent scientist who was chief scientist for NASA,
discovered CFCs and their link to holes in the ozone, coined the concept
and idea of Gaia and will be at the age of 96, Branson’s guest on Virgin
Galactic’s first commercial space) he said he had been asked in the late 1960’s
by Baron Rothschild, Chairman of Shell to write an essay on the
prospects of Shell in the year 2000. James says the essay stood the test
of time, since he said Shell and other industrial companies would be so
concerned with global pollution that they would be selling products that
alleviated the pollution! Shell was also the only organisation that supported
James’s work on Gaia.
My own contact
with this magic apart from James Lovelock, was Clem
Sunter. Engaging, charismatic and comfortable with making accessible the
long view of complexity, he was CEO of Anglo American and later Chair of
the Anglo American Fund. Clem opened our Summer Workshop on
Organisational Complexity. He was part of the Shell Scenario
planning and brought this revolutionary game play to South Africa, then
caught in the Apartheid quagmire. He toured the country talking about
“High Road and Low Road” scenarios, presenting the most riveting hour and
a half presentation (with nary an overhead) and so the legend goes,
convincing President de Klerk and the Apartheid government of the need to
release Mandela. Clem has written a number of books – including the Mind of the Fox and Scenario Planning.
Some Key Points from the attached;
- · Lift your long term planning – look into the future; think holistically. A longer term focus in a prerequisite for resilience, but beware, with long term strategies and thinking comes increased complexity.
- · Consider multiple paths and options that lead into the future; create narratives, keep the accountants away – put your high potentials into scenario planning…
- · The real importance of scenario planning is that it stretches the time horizon of your company from one or two years, to ten or twenty years and increases the bandwidth of perceptions coming in from the “umwelt” (environments)
- · Decision making is a learning processes, needs to be fun and laughter tends to broaden the horizons
- · There are the routine and non-routine decisions – delegate the routine work to where it will be dealt with more effectively; don’t waste executive leadership on time on it….
- · The role of the Tavistock Institute (home to Elliott Jaques and many influential thinkers)
- · The intelligence quotient of the management team is equal to the lowest common denominator of the team –this applies to boards as well – the n and n+1 principle applies
- · Decision taking in complexity is speeded up by play and that it is a language based social process –
- · He talks about the why – questions asked at the Innovative Domain of work and above
- · The future is not predicted by financial figures, they are a record of the past – looking from our company outwards encourage engaging with the “umwelt” – the external world
- · Club of Rome report on limits of growth sparked of scenario planning – is there life after oil? Ties back to James Lovelock’s paper.
- · As individuals are always thinking into the future…. Dwelling in the umwelt… having a one track future means we filter narrowly, having executive teams doing this means you work at too low a level; again like boards
- · Capital is no longer the critical success factor – people are and managing talent requires far longer time horizons then predicting profit and loss and balance sheets and they are the key competitive advantage.
- · Use words accurately – sustainability is not what we do – we are trying to be resilient – sustainability is a zero carbon footprint and doing no harm. There are no sustainable consumer companies but there are resilient ones…
If you want to
read more go to How Shell Oil used Requisite Organization
Concepts to reorganize Shell around the world - John Hofmeister, VP Human
Resources CEO Shell Americas – Video 2009 at the Global
Organisation Design Society
Cheers
Andrew Olivier: The Working Journey