There Is No Alternative to ...

By: Ian WylieWed Dec 19, 2007 at 12:35 AM

How do you develop strategy in an uncertain economy? Meet TINA: There Is No Alternative. First, Royal Dutch/Shell pioneered the system of scenario planning to anticipate dramatic changes in the world. But when everything starts to change, the way to do planning is to focus on things that don't change.

TINA Goes to Work

Over time, the GBE team found TINA to be a liberating and empowering concept. "We all argued against TINA vociferously, but we came to see her strengths," says Ged Davis, Rainbow's deputy at the time.

"TINA dramatizes the situation, creates atmosphere, and leads to more emotional investment in the outcome," says Flowers, who is now director of the LBJ Library and Museum at the University of Texas at Austin. "TINA is in-your-face. People immediately respond, 'But there's always an alternative!' TINA raises the temperature and the stakes, enabling you to do a lot of intense work in a short period of time. Scenario building is a dramatic exercise where you make up a script and cast the actors. When TINA comes on stage, the drama begins."

The GBE team offered Shell two scenarios -- called Just Do It and Da Wo -- for exploiting the forces of TINA. In the first, success would come to those who took advantage of quick-moving opportunities in a world of hypercompetition. The successful Just Do It company would permit full expression of individual creativity and foster new ways of doing business and solving problems.

In the second scenario, countries and companies would discover that success demanded a committed investment in relationships of trust. In that world, Da Wo (big me) organizations would owe their success to understanding that individual welfare is linked to the welfare of the whole.

Those are the options, TINA said. Which one will you choose? Shell management had already embarked on a reorganization program designed to replace the company's own complex matrix of national fiefdoms with four global businesses: exploration and production, downstream gas and power, oil products, and chemicals. The introduction of TINA gave impetus to the change process as Rainbow took his scenarios to the front line.

Rainbow listened in on the conversation as employees got to know TINA. "TINA and the 1995 scenarios were powerful in that they helped people talk about the tone of the company and the ways in which Shell had to change," Rainbow says. "To have a conversation, you need a common language. And TINA was hugely helpful in encapsulating a complex set of ideas within a simple phrase."

Changing the direction of a company like Shell is like altering the course of one of its supertankers. Scenario planners are also loath to plot a straight line between cause and effect. But seven years after the Brent Spar and Nigeria, Shell has reclaimed the accolade of being one of the most admired companies, globally and in Britain, in separate surveys by Fortune and the UK business magazine Management Today.

Shell has made steady progress toward becoming a Just Do It, slimmed-down oil company, sorting out its portfolio, increasing capital efficiency, and cutting costs at a rate of $4 billion a year. On the Da Wo scorecard, Shell now publishes reports on its environmental and social record. It will invest $1 billion in renewable energy in the next five years, and it has spent millions to engage with environmentalists and human-rights groups.

TINA Grows Up

Even the unchangeable is subject to change. At Shell, TINA has taken on a life of her own. In the 1998 scenarios, she returned more powerful than ever. TINA operated at two levels: TINA Above, which worked at the level of markets, financial systems, governments, and other wide-reaching institutions; and TINA Below, which worked at the level of individual people, who, in many parts of the world, were becoming wealthier, better educated, and freer to choose.

In the latest scenarios, published at the beginning of the year, TINA has matured further. In the tradition of all inspired storytellers, Ged Davis, now GBE's vice president, has expanded TINA's tale to include the three R's: regulations, restraint, and rules. Those three local forces will modify the ubiquitous forces of globalization, liberalization, and technology.

In Davis's version of TINA and the three R's, people want the efficiencies that market liberalization brings. But they also want appropriate regulation to assure things like continuity of electricity supply at a reasonable price. Technology has a powerful forward momentum, but the applications of, say, biotechnology and nanotechnology raise ethical dilemmas. And while technology is pushing out the boundaries of what it means to be human, globalization is pulling in the boundaries of culture and family. The result: local resistance to an inrush of unfamiliar ideas, products, and services from multinational companies.

"We argued about TINA again last year and whether we should leave her out of the new scenarios," says Davis. "We decided not to, because behind TINA there is something more fundamental, even if the original definition is redundant. It's extremely valuable to gain clarity about what is really predetermined and what is uncertain. TINA is the essence of good scenario planning. So TINA lives on."

Ian Wylie (iwylie@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor based in England. Read the Shell scenarios on the Web (www.shell.com/scenarios).