20. SETTING THE FIELD

I arrived in London in mid-April 1990, a time of astonishing change in the world. Just a few months earlier, the Berlin Wall had abruptly crumbled. The Soviet Union had also collapsed, and with it, the assumptions and framework of international affairs since the Second World War. It was a time of great excitement and anticipation, and I felt certain it was right for me to be in this place at this particular time.

I had undergone an intensive screening process over the four months following my initial contact with Renata Karlin, making several trips to London and the Hague where I had met with many of the senior officers in the Royal Dutch Shell Group. During this process, I spent a significant amount of time with the planning coordinator, Arie de Geus, to whom Karlin reported, and in the final stage of the process, I spent the better part of a day in the Hague with the chairman and deputy chairman of the Group.

I had done a significant amount of homework over the intervening months since I had first been contacted by Shell. I had read everything I could put my hands on about the Shell Group and its processes of scenario planning. I felt comfortable with the concept of planning through the means of scenarios, expecially because I felt that it would never again be possible for business and governments to effectively “plan” a long-term future. Instead, it was necessary to learn to create and discover an unfolding future. I could see how the Shell process of scenario planning fit right into the center of the quantum view of the universe that Bohm had described to me so long ago. It was all consonant with the way I had begun to operate in my own life.

All matter and the universe are continually in motion. At a level we cannot see, there is an unbroken wholeness, an “implicate order” out of which seemingly discrete events arise. All human beings are part of that unbroken whole, which is continually unfolding. Two of our responsibilities in life are to be open and to learn, thereby becoming more capable of sensing and actualizing emerging new realities.

Now I felt that I was being given an opportunity to learn more about this process but on a vastly larger scale, in an organization with over 120,000 employees operating in more than one hundred countries worldwide. Moreover, my inner voice was saying that this was an important opportunity to begin to learn how these principles might be applied on a global scale outside the realm of the corporation itself. This seemed to be part of what was unfolding for me—the opportunity to begin to learn about positively influencing and shaping global events rather than simply accepting and reacting to the larger forces that were at play.

It may have seemed grandiose, even foolish to think in such large terms, and, being mindful of this, I was careful about what I said about these feelings and to whom I said it. Yet my understanding of the way the universe works led me to believe that this kind of learning was not just possible but imperative if the world was going to successfully navigate the turbulent times ahead.

Among large corporations, it seemed to me that Royal Dutch Shell was unique in somehow being able, with remarkable regularity, to tap into the very best thinking about the future. I hoped to better understand exactly how the scenario process really worked and how it might be developed further. As early as 1972, Shell scenarios envisaged the formation of OPEC and the sudden oil price shock that hit in the winter 1973–1974, just as they foresaw the equally significant oil price collapse that began in January 1986. In 1984, a proprietary Shell regional scenario, dubbed The Greening of Russia, described a possible breakup of the Soviet Union and the ensuing chaos in Eastern Europe. What interested me most was not just the accuracy of these stories, but the way the scenario process might help people to better perceive complex realities and to shape the future, not only within, but beyond the corporation itself.

I was aware, for example, of the significant impact the Shell scenario process had made in South Africa in recent years. A scenario team that included former Shell scenario chief Pierre Wack was formed in the early 1980s in South Africa. Supported by the Anglo-American Mining Corporation, the team had seen a “high road” and a “low road” in South Africa’s future. Starting around 1985, presentations based on the team’s work were made to government officials, business leaders, black community groups, and groups of exiled black leaders. These presentations engaged thousands of people in thinking about the choices ahead. Either apartheid could be dismantled, and the country could develop an open political and economic system and reenter the world community, or apartheid could continue, with the country experiencing increasing isolation, economic stagnation, and internal strife. The remarkable developments that became evident publicly at the time of de Klerk’s historic speech in February 1990 and that have continued to unfold to this day had, in many important respects, their roots in the discovery by the South African people that the course they were on was unsustainable and that they had a choice about their future.

I continued to think about Bell’s theorem and my meeting with Bohm, which had forever changed my view of how the universe is linked together by a fabric of invisible connections. I realized that small changes at just the right place can have a systemwide impact because these changes share the unbroken wholeness that unites the entire system. A seemingly insignificant act in one part of the whole creates nonlocal results that emerge far away. Unseen connections create effects at a distance—“quantum leaps”—in places quite surprising to us. This model of change comported with my daily experience much more so than the traditional model of incremental change.

I was aware scientists had begun to speak of “fields” to explain the connections that they observed. Bohm had mentioned the “general fielding” for all humankind when we met together in London. “We are all connected and operate within living fields of thought and perception,” he had said to me.

Just a few months prior to moving to London for this assignment, I had an opportunity to learn more about this new type of field theory from a prominent British biologist, Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake and I were guests of a mutual friend whose home was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I spent the weekend absorbed in conversation with him and walked away from that encounter with a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of dialogue, of how the universe is interconnected, and of how my work at Shell might contribute on a wider basis.

Fields, Sheldrake said, are nonmaterial regions of influence—invisible forces that structure space or behavior. The earth’s gravitational field, for example, is all around us. We cannot see it, it’s not a material object, but it’s nevertheless real. It gives things weight and makes things full. There are also magnetic fields that underlie the functioning of our brains and bodies. Countless vibratory patterns of activity occur within these fields, which we can’t detect with our senses, but which can be tuned in to radio and TV receivers. “Although the nature of fields is inevitably mysterious, we take all of this for granted,” he told me. There are also, he said, fundamental quantum matter fields recognized by physicists—electron fields, neutron fields, and others. They are “invisible, intangible, inaudible, tasteless, and odorless,” and yet in quantum theory, they are the substance of the universe. Fields are states of space, but space is full of energy and invisible structures that interconnect.

As we spoke, I couldn’t help but think of the energy field that I experienced consistently there in Santa Fe, particularly at the home of Charles and Beth Miller, where we were staying that weekend. Over the years, I had often come to the Millers’ home (which was also the artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s former residence, Sol y Sombra), to write and think and learn by engaging in deep conversation with the remarkable people who gathered there. I could literally feel the field forming whenever I was there—like my experiences at the cathedral at Chartres, or on backpacking trips in the wilderness, or in the dialogues around the campfire during the Leadership Forum wilderness experience, and even on the racetrack at Monza.

The time spent with Sheldrake gave me a deeper appreciation for the possibilities of dialogue and of large systems change. As a result of this encounter, I began to see more clearly the importance of dialogue and organizational learning for the process by which humans might govern themselves.

At the outset of my assignment with Shell, all of this was at the forefront of my mind. For four months I lived alone in London while Mavis completed her first year of residency for medical school. This gave me the time I needed to get completely grounded in the work I intended to do. I spent all of my time alone reading and thinking, considering both the immediate and the larger purpose of the work I was undertaking. For many years I had followed the discipline of preparing the personal choices and fundamental goals I sought to accomplish for the coming year. I wrote these down and, on a regular basis, painted pictures in my mind of what I had chosen to do. At the top of the list I prepared in January 1990 was to create for Royal Dutch Shell a set of global scenarios that would begin the process of positively shaping and influencing collective thought, not only in Shell, but in the world at large—scenarios that would help ensure social cohesion in a world of increasing fragmentation. My commitment was to do all that was within my power to accomplish this and, in that process, to trust nature that whatever was needed would become available to me.

In order to accomplish this goal, I knew I had to develop these scenarios collectively with the most diverse and knowledgeable scenario team I could put together. These scenarios could not be developed by me alone with a support staff feeding information to me. Rather, these scenarios would have to be developed through the collective wisdom of the entire unit. Diversity on the team was a prime objective, and I immediately focused on accomplishing that objective.

A number of the players were already on board, but others, from both inside and outside Shell, were left to recruit. We ultimately had people on the team from Japan, Singapore, Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, France, England, and Scotland. We had good luck in the recruitment process, but we missed on the people we tried to locate and recruit from South America, India, and China.

With the team assembled, I set about doing what I could to help set the field—that is, to set the space within our organization by articulating the values we held, what we considered important, how we interacted among ourselves, and how we would interact with the rest of the Group. We instituted a process that enabled us to stay in constant conversation with one another. This included regular debriefing sessions, luncheon learning sessions, a constant stream of interesting outside speakers, and regular “away days” for the entire team to learn together and to reconnect with one another.

The first task was to set the vision for our team and for how we were to operate. I was gratified at the overall group coherence that I saw from the outset. There was high energy on this team—this was a group of highly intelligent people hand-picked from all the disciplines represented in the Group. The balance, about 20 percent, were recruited from the outside. These were all “racehorses” who knew the import and value to the Group of the work we were to undertake, and who were proud to be on this select team.

I was struck, however, from the very outset at how rational the Westerners in the group seemed to be, and how skeptical and even disdainful most of them were of anything that smacked of what they referred to as “the soft stuff”—anything that could not be measured or quantified. Graphs and charts were the order of the day because quantification and measurement were what was seen as real. This was very difficult for me because over the previous ten years or so I had come to see the immeasurable as precisely that which was most real, that which I cared most deeply about. I recalled what Bohm had said about this: “The attempt to suppose that measure exists prior to man and independently of him leads, as has been seen, to the ‘objectification’ of man’s insight so that it becomes rigidified and unable to change, eventually bringing about fragmentation and general confusion.”

I felt like a fish out of water a great deal of the time during these early days. On the other hand, I knew this was a blessing to me, because I needed this kind of exposure to give me the capacity and balance to handle such encounters effectively in the future. This was part of the reason I was here, part of my learning. And I did have an immense amount to learn in a very short period of time. So from the outset I became an open system, listening, absorbing, asking questions, and understanding all I could about the business of the Shell Group worldwide, about how it was managed, and about its unique corporate culture. This process was greatly enhanced by the scenario interview process I began early on in my assignment.

Over the following six months I met with some fifty or so of the Group’s senior management, including the managing directors, regional and functional coordinators, and CEOs of the most important Shell operating companies worldwide. I spent three very intense hours, sometimes more, locked away with these managers in one-on-one conversations. They understood exactly why I was there—to uncover their mental models of the external and internal environment of Shell, the first step in developing global scenarios for the Group. It was a fascinating experience and absolutely the best process for building relationships and familiarizing me with the overall culture of the Group. Many of these conversations rose to the level of dialogue or close to it. They were rich with meaning. All of the hallmarks were there—the flow, the unusual coherence, and the sense of collective wisdom arising from the encounters. And in this process I met a number of people who were clearly like family—people I knew I could count on for resources, connections, and support whenever I needed help as my work unfolded.

Out of this process, it was our tentative conclusion that the global scenarios for the next thirty years should principally revolve around the issue of the relationships between the rich and poor countries of the world. We went to work testing our ideas and doing intense research on key issues. We assigned “building blocks” to small project teams who were to research and develop issues and then report back to the whole group in three-day plenary sessions that we held offsite.

Over the next twelve months, members of our team fanned out all over the world doing “on the ground” research. We began with the emerging countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, India, China, and the newly industrializing countries of southeast Asia, South Africa, and the Middle East. We also spent a lot of time in the industrialized countries, especially the United States, Canada, Japan, and European countries. In this process, we met the most remarkable people imaginable. We used the considerable clout of the Royal Dutch Shell Group to open doors in these countries, putting together one- and two-day workshops with the best-informed people from all the disciplines we could find. We invited the key managers in the local operating company to attend these roundtable conversations. From these joint conversations, other doors would begin to open. At that point we would let nature take its course, leading us from one insightful person to the next.

We came away from this experience with a profoundly different view of the world than we had had going into it. We didn’t yet understand all of the underlying structures and the driving forces, but we all realized that we were witnessing a moment of revolutionary change in world history. Our work over the next eight months would be to put that overarching structure in place and to tell the two compelling stories of the future that we saw forming in our minds.