How Shell survived the 1973 crisis while others didn’t.
It worked for them. Why isn’t it working for me?
My first real client call opened with that line.
She was running a footwear business and promoting it on LinkedIn to get brand deals. 12 months later and 0 clients, we’re talking over google meets about what she can do differently.
“I spend 7 hours a week on LinkedIn sharing footwear content. I run out of ideas often.”.
We looked at her posts and they were indistinguishable from other footwear companies.
I asked her “what footwear topics does no one talk about? What excites you about the industry?”
She exploded with ideas. We talked for over an hour about ideas and how she can get more visibility for her company.
3 months later, she got 95% inbound leads, $500K in revenue in one month, and deals working with Nike, Adidas, Converse, Puma, and other global brands.
But that conversation stuck with me for a different reason.
I was making the same mistake as my client.
When I first started writing online, I spent time reverse outlining what made good essays and posts. Hoping mine could have the same impact.
But of course it never did. It always melted into the online content ocean.
Robert Greene’s “Mastery” systematized the learning process. In his book, Greene covers 30 individuals and how they became masters at what they do. Study the masters and learn from them.
After finishing his book, I tried applying it to my writing. Doing what other master writers did, following routines of Stephen King or Charles Dickens. But again, I got nowhere. My writing didn’t sound any better.
I was doing what everyone does. Study successful people, copy their process, expect the same results. And I got nowhere.
It wasn’t until I read “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke that I realized Greene’s “Mastery” is only one way to become a master.
The other path to mastery I didn’t know.
“Piranesi” is about two people stuck in a home of infinite rooms and hallways, with each chamber having its own atmosphere, animals, and ecosystem.
Two men with two completely different ways of understanding the world.
One man named “Piranesi” catalogs the tides and paths of birds for decades, seeing wonder everywhere. Another man named “The Other” brings measuring devices trying to force the House to reveal its secrets. The House closes itself off to extraction but opens itself to wonder & curiosity.
I realized I was “the Other” in business. I was dissecting when I should’ve been building and learning. Letting my own curiosity lead the path to build my own mastery.
Greene’s take on mastery focused on fields that were repeatable. In fields like surgery or chess, we can practice procedures and strategies consistently that would lead to success. But in fields like writing, creativity, or being an authority in footwear, there aren’t clear repeatable steps to success.
If we try to dissect everything into repeatable chunks so we can predict success, the results can be catastrophic.
In 1973, 7 oil companies found out the hard way.
In 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, Arab nations put an embargo on oil sent to the US. Oil prices rose 4x in a few months, and oil companies panicked.
They were draining cash, oil reserves were locked in other countries, and poor investments piled up. The companies brought in consultants to create reports based on past trends and data. Similar to what Greene mentions in “Mastery” about studying the masters and learning from them, but in this case the masters were past data points.
While those companies were scrambling based on their strategy documents, Royal Dutch Shell wasn’t worried because the crisis wasn’t a surprise to them.
In 1959, Shell started a group to predict future trends using long range studies to help them consider alternative futures, but these studies weren’t writing forecasts or spreadsheets. They were writing stories.
They focused on 2 storylines: Storyline A & Storyline B.
Storyline A was based on growing tensions and protectionism focused on the technical limits of oil extraction and emphasized how shortages might happen. Basically a worse-case scenario.
Storyline B was based on free trade and market relations. A hopeful future.
The goal for these storylines wasn’t to predict the future.
“The purpose of planning is to change the mental model of the decision maker. Unless this happens, nothing will follow. It will be like water on a stone. “-- Scenario Planning - Pierre Wack - YouTube
At that time, most oil executives believed that tensions in the Middle East would soon abate because Western-dominated stability would triumph; it always had before. They believed Storyline B will exist and focused only on that.
Royal Dutch Shell instead focused both on Storyline A and Storyline B asking themselves “What would we do if this did happen?”
Following Storyline B, Shell moved away from heavy fuels (shipping, power plants) to light fuels (gasoline and diesel) because light fuels are harder to replace. When oil prices shot up to $13 per barrel to eventually $37 per barrel, Shell was in the best position possible.
By the end of the crisis, only Exxon & Royal Dutch Shell earned huge profits while other large oil companies of the time Texaco, Mobil, BP, and others suffered major financial losses and dropped.
Oil companies tried to predict the future and it burned them.
They treated the oil market like something they can study based on past data to predict where it will go.
It’s like predicting the next earthquake based on earthquake rubble. This works in some areas but not all, especially in areas where the environment is more dynamic.
When what you’re studying is more dynamic like oil futures, business, marketing, or building authority, dissecting past data (or studying other successful people) won’t work because we don’t have the same conditions they do for success.
Greene’s “Mastery” focuses on fields where masters are available, and the knowledge is not in a dynamic area. The method works when mastery is transferable through observation.
In Piranesi, the Other dissected the House and failed to understand it. Piranesi’s relationship with the House only works because it’s HIS relationship. Even if The Other had apprenticed under Piranesi instead of trying to extract knowledge, it wouldn’t have worked because the House reveals itself through relationship, not technique.
The difference between “Mastery” and “Piranesi” is “Mastery” assumes knowledge can be learned from the masters through apprenticeship while Piranesi assumes knowledge is learned through the relationship we have with what we’re learning. It’s not something that can be extracted in an apprenticeship.
Give two people the goal of becoming painters, and they will have different results despite learning from the same teacher.
Studying the Masters gives inspiration but copying them doesn’t guarantee success. The path to success depends upon the person applying it rather than the techniques themselves.
What killed those oil companies during the 1973 crisis was treating the oil markers as something they can predict.
Treating strategy documents as fortune cookies.
“A poorly observed fact is more treacherous than wrong reasoning.” – Pierre Wack, 1993 on Scenario Planning
My footwear client was struggling because she was reverse engineering someone else’s success. Copying the masters online and expecting the same result. She saw them post
Then I worked with her. We focused on her starting point because everyone used the same techniques but it’s about the person’s relationship that gets them ahead.
Like Piranesi, we focused on what she enjoyed about footwear then applied those same techniques to her content and business.
She mastered the marketing channels because she understood what made her work stand above using her own rules. Her business growth compounded, and people saw her as an authority in the space.
Because authority as a domain is a dynamic system that changes depending upon how you engage with it. If she stuck with copying the other masters, she wouldn’t have much authority because people wouldn’t notice her. Since she led with her passion and curiosity, we developed her own type of authority.
What does your strategy doc, forecast, or projection not show you?
Shell didn’t craft more strategy documents to predict the future. They created stories to challenge their assumptions. No strategy holds up to reality because we cannot predict everything.
“When taking actions, wise people apply multiple models like a doctor’s set of diagnostic tests. They use models to rule out some actions and privilege others. Wise people and teams construct a dialogue across models, exploring their overlaps and differences.” ― Scott E. Page, The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
No one can predict the future, no matter what McKinsey consultants tell you. The forecasts often give us tunnel vision into what the future might hold rather than challenge our assumptions on how we would react.
Instead of another strategy doc, we need storylines about the future. Challenge our assumptions and ask “what would we do if this did happen?”
First you need to know your field and pick 2 storylines, a best case scenario and worst-case scenario.
One storyline will be the best case scenario. Maybe more funding in your field and advancements to getting to a product quickly. It stems from a core question of “if you knew you’d succeed, how would you make choices?”
The worst case scenario is the opposite. It is where supply chains get cut, a pandemic happens, funding gets cut. A plausible worst-case scenario that forces you to challenge your assumptions. Ask yourself “If you lost 50% of revenue and supply, what would you do?”
Let’s use the manufacturing robotics industry as an example.
Storyline A could be an optimistic scenario where more funding is put into research for machine learning algorithms. Companies are investing more in manufacturing robotics and need better sensor fusion for larger environments.
Storyline B is a worst case scenario. Supply chains get strangled due to conflict elsewhere which reduces the number of parts you can order. Funding gets cut nationwide because the government wants to divert money elsewhere.
The question becomes how do you react to each of these stories?
Not just theoretically, but if they were real, what specific steps would you take? Also, what signs do you need to watch for in case one of these storylines actually comes true.
When creating storylines, it’s not about predicting the future.
Like Shell, they wanted to challenge their assumptions. They didn’t commit to 1 storyline.
Prepare for both, watch for signals, then act when you see which future is emerging
“It worked for them. Why isn’t it working for me?”
My footwear client spent 7 hours a week copying what worked for others. Zero clients. She spent too long studying finished products with years of work behind hoping to extract secrets.
She spent one hour talking about what actually excited her. $500K in deals.
The oil companies spent years analyzing past crises. Lost billions. Shell spent time engaging with present forces. Made billions.
When we study finished products, we’re studying corpses hoping to learn how they lived in an environment. It’s like you’re trying to learn how birds fly in flocks by studying how a bird’s anatomy works. You’ll learn how birds work, but you won’t understand how they fly in flocks because that requires observation and letting your mind wander.
When we study from curiosity and following our interests, we build our own form of mastery. Our own garden
It comes down to 2 questions:
What are you trying to learn by studying someone else’s finished work?
What would happen if you engaged with the living process instead?
The difference between those two questions is the difference between my client’s first 12 months and her next 3.
Which question are you asking?
If you need help practicing storylines, I’m holding open workshops where we go through 30-minute exercises exploring how the future might change and how we can prepare for it now.
Book a time here: https://tidycal.com/mohammadukhan135/fiction-as-future-prototyping-workshop
Note if you want to learn more about Pierre Wack, he gives a presentation on what he did:
Brilliantly dissected and retold!!! The thing that others miss is that the story is pointless if it is only a story. It is tracking the signals that converts its value. "If this were to happen, what would I do?"