Shell’s solution to resource problems lies in innovation

HUGH Mitchell, Shell’s human resources chief

AS countries worldwide hurtle toward urbanization amid climate change, governments and companies alike face more complex challenges in feeding, heating, cooling and moving people.

Cities, in the words of Shell’s human resources chief Hugh Mitchell, can be both the problem and opportunity.

Cities offer “the most effective way to use energy,” says Mitchell on the sidelines of the recent Shell Eco-marathon in Manila. “But if cities are just sprawled in an uncontrolled way, then you can have very inefficient cities which [become]… a drain on energy.”

As someone who comes from the United Kingdom, Mitchell says he sees in Manila some similarities with the cities back home in terms of sprawl.

These cities, he says, have just grown through people spilling onto every available space.

Unproductive

Tourists in dense cities worldwide realize this coming from the airport: Sitting in a vehicle, at some point it dawns on you that you may just be sitting there for hours, unable to get far. The engine is running but you’re not going anywhere.

Your fuel use is unproductive and, most likely, your time will be wasted, too.

That’s an example of inefficient use of resources in cities, Mitchell says.

“We have to acknowledge that as a society,” he explains. “I think all countries in all parts of the world are wrestling with this dilemma.”

Being an energy company, he says, Shell wants to be part of that debate about cities and development between governments, experts and citizens.

“Shell’s eco-marathon is a little bit of a link to that [urbanization and energy] because we believe a lot of the solutions to such challenges do lie in technology and… innovation,” Mitchell says.

Competitive element

The eco-marathon calls on student-teams from around the world to design, build and test energy-efficient vehicles. The teams that go the furthest using the least amount of fuel per type win. There are also off-track prizes, such as vehicle design, technical innovation, safety, and even a “Perseverance and Spirit of the Event Award.”

There is a competitive element. But to Mitchell’s mind, it is “pretty mild,” and the overall spirit of the event is to get young people to work in teams and turn their ideas into reality.

“To me, the eco-marathon is really to excite young people to address the energy challenge,” Mitchell says. “The deeper message is that we need innovation, we need collaboration, we need different ways to give what the world needs with less impact on the planet.”

Mitchell says the skills needed in the world of industry may be the same, but different ways of understanding and addressing challenges are needed.

“In my industry, I need geologists, I need petrophysicists, I need project engineers. These are disciplines that have been around for a hundred years. What I need is for those to connect in a much different way so that we can get the richness of the innovation that comes from the connectivity,” Mitchell said.

Transcending borders

A good example is, if you put IT people alongside traditional engineering people in the workplace, you enable a whole different suite of solutions than if you just had IT people in one room and engineers in another, Mitchell says.

Another point to consider is that energy depletion, climate change and the challenges presented by the world’s dwindling resources transcend borders. One way of fostering innovation, then, is to connect people through the Internet and social media.

After all, we are in a world where a person with a great idea in the Philippines can connect with, say, people in Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom or Argentina with other great ideas.

The Philippines is hosting the eco-marathon, and this only goes to show how much Shell believes in the country’s talent pool, he says.

“Our business is essentially run by Filipinos in many parts,” Mitchell points out. “A lot of the population growth and urban challenges are happening in Asia, and those challenges can best be addressed by young people in the Philippines and, generally, in Southeast Asia.”

Doing things the right way

The key, Mitchell says, is to harness young talent from universities and get them to work together with people of different backgrounds, interests and even age.

Every year, Shell brings in more than a thousand fresh new graduates, he says. “I want lots of young people in the company. But I want them to be challenging, to question whether we do things the right way, and if there is an alternative way.”

Mitchell says he values experience, but he is also keen on welcoming fresh graduates who show potential for innovative ideas and who can work with various types of people.

“With retirement ages extending, we could have four generations in the workplace,” he says. “That, to me, offers huge opportunities, but only if managed well.”

With diversity, he says, comes the environment needed to foster innovation.

Cities, governments, companies and organizations should be thinking about how to foster diversity and a healthy amount of interaction and competition among different people, instead of fretting over skills, he says.

“I don’t worry about the skills. I think the skills are there,” Mitchell says.

How do you spot innovators? Mitchell counts the ways:

Curiosity sparks ingenuity. To innovate, Mitchell says, one must have curiosity.

“I think a lot of it is mind-set, rather than skill. And the core of the mind-set for me is curiosity,” he says.

Innovation is impossible without understanding the challenge being addressed, he adds. People then need to be able to look at a challenge, and then want to try and understand it.

Have you ever seen a child taking a toy race car or model airplane apart in order to put it back together? That may be the beginnings of a curious and “can-do” mind-set that fosters innovation, he explains.

There can’t only be one. Mitchell says the best innovation typically arises from a group activity, where ideas are bounced off each other.

Often, he says, the best innovation is when two people working on completely different things come together, quite often by accident, and create something that is phenomenally brilliant.

“The other bit of mind-set to me is that notion of being transparent, communicative, and really reaching out to other people to collaborate on innovation,” Mitchell says.

Landing ideas. “The third bit that plays heavily for me in innovation is, ultimately, ideas have to land and have to be practical… and implementable,” Mitchell points out.

Again, Mitchell highlights the need for innovators to be open-minded and cooperative to arrive at the right outcome.

To land the plane, so to speak, is to take an idea and put it into practical form that somebody can actually make work and will attract or spark investment for wider application, he explains.

“You can do something on a small scale where the economics is not so critical. But the moment you want to scale up on a national or global basis, unless you can actually make that economic, it just can’t get the investment, and it gets stuck there,” Mitchell says.