What’s Your Strategic Approach?

I’m writing my next book about The Moment. Through these summer editions, I’m exploring the forces shaping The Moment and what it means for you, the oil and gas leader. The Moment is giving us the most important opportunity in our lifetimes to play a positive leadership role in the energy future.

Today I follow up on “The Offense Myth,” which addressed your critiques and questions on my essay “Why We Will Fail.” In “The Offense Myth,” I addressed why choosing to persuade those who disagree with us is more effective than following our default instinct of “going on offense.” Today, I take a closer look at the differences between “persuasion,” “education,” and “going on offense.” (Spoiler alert: it’s in the degree of your attentiveness to your audience.) This informs the most important question to ask about your strategic approach, which will lead to a better way to “go on offense.”

What’s the Difference Between Persuasion, Education, and Going on Offense?

The difference between persuasion and education: It’s about your attitude toward your audience. Education implies a teacher and a student—and, if we’re being honest, a lecture. Importantly, it implies a differential in not just knowledge but power. Persuasion instead puts the stakeholder at the center: Whom does the person trust? What does she believe? What does he fear, value, admire? It puts the persuader in the position of offering a suggestion, a point of view—from a position of genuine humility. Persuasion happens within the bounds of a relationship that has some foundation of trust. (And, if you give it some thought, successful education does, too.)

The difference between persuasion and old-school offense: At its heart, persuasion as a strategic approach is about building rapport with other leaders, stakeholders, and audiences. Ultimately, it leaves room for you, the persuader, to also be persuaded. (Do you find conversation compelling with someone who wants to change your mind, but not be changed by their interaction with you?) Because relationships are central to a successfully persuasive engagement strategy, the outcome must be, by definition, co-created—and therefore unknown. The end goal is to be at the table, co-creating the energy future. Notably, the end goal is not to go in knowing what the energy future looks like.

The difference between persuasion alone and a real sustainability leadership strategy: Is persuasion alone enough? No! Persuasion is the strategic approach, but it’s not the entire strategy. Successful leadership requires an ambitious and optimistic vision of the future that offers an antidote to the apocalypse. It requires real investments and plans. It requires demonstrable, verifiable results. And it requires engaging again and again in this very difficult business of meeting rising energy demand while decarbonizing the energy system—with real plans and real humility.

To What End: What’s Your Theory of Success?

When building any business strategy, you begin with your end goal. You develop a theory of success about how you will reach it. And then you build a strategy in support of that theory.

I’m ultimately agnostic on the energy and climate solution sets. When there are better options than oil, natural gas, and their refined products—by which I mean solutions that are affordable, reliable, accessible, and at scale—I’ll be working for them. And I have little doubt many of today’s most forward-thinking oil and gas leaders will be right there with me!

We need the oil and gas industry to energize the world while decarbonizing it—that’s why my end goal is to have oil and gas leaders seated at the most important energy and climate politics and policy tables. That’s why I write this newsletter and host the Energy Thinks podcast. That’s why my firm advises forward-thinking oil and gas companies on leading into the energy future.

And my theory of success incorporates persuasion as a strategic approach because

• Persuasiveness can and will make us co-contributors to the energy transition solution set and leaders in that solution set’s execution.
• Persuasiveness gives us the opportunity to engage pragmatically and holistically, bringing our full expertise on the cost, reliability, and complexity of the energy system.
• Persuasiveness also allows us to talk about time scale at those tables and to broaden the solution sets in response to those longer horizons.

When we are at the table, we inform the conversation.

So: What’s your end goal? It can be different from mine, but you should have a clear goal—as well as a theory of how you will achieve success: what it will take to get there.

There are plenty of oil and gas leaders with different goals, different definitions of success. And there’s a wedge of those who are close enough to my perspective that we collaborate on this endeavor.

But if your definition of success is that we don’t need to address climate, that we should roll back progress on decarbonization, or that we should yell, “Carbon emissions forever!” … my crystal ball says you’re not going to like how that movie ends.

I’ve been making the case that the action on climate is directional for several years now. The rise of the millennials, public concern about climate change, and the climatization of everything from finance to energy diplomacy have persuaded me there’s no turning back the clock to a simpler time, when we didn’t have to persuade to lead. (For more on this, see Adamantine’s Foundation Papers and my books The Gamechanger’s Playbook: How Oil and Gas Companies Thrive in an Era of Continuous Disruption and Real Decarbonization: How Oil and Gas Companies Are Seizing the Low-Carbon Future.)

The best way to get oil and gas leaders into the most important energy and climate conversations puts persuasiveness—not going on offense—at the heart of the strategic approach. That’s my theory of success. What’s yours? And if you’re assuming we can turn back the clock to make it happen, what supports that assumption?

Okay, Fine—Let’s Go on Offense. A Different Kind of Offense.

I find it useful to give all actors, even super-unhelpful energy industry advocates and deeply hostile climate activists, the benefit of the doubt. With very few exceptions, individuals believe that they are waking up each morning on the side of right.

So what if we went “on offense”—with a mind not to lecture and browbeat, but to collaborate on what can be effective in the big picture and the long term? What if we set aside the easy, feel-good click-bait attacks and critiques and tended to the slow, patient work of building trust, gaining credibility, and offering solutions?

Many people out in the world are only very lightly attached to their energy and climate views (as you probably feel about, say, health-care policy), including many elected officials and policymakers. This creates openings—openings that are squandered in an old-school offense. What if instead we played to actually win and not just feel good about saying things that can be … well … offensive?

Feeling motivated and inoffensive? Please forward this Both True to three colleagues. Open to a different kind of offense? Hit that heart button below.

Offhandedly,

Tisha