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236 CHAPTER 8
6 Leveraging knowledge and social capital.
7 Creating a set of financial incentives that rewards brokers for brokering sustainable
deals.
8 Marketing sustainable brokerage primarily through a category build, using outreach
to share best practices with the brokerage community generally.
Let’s consider each step in greater detail.
RE-FRAMING THE NOTION OF BROKERAGE
Climate scientist Joseph Romm, in his book Cool Companies, recounts a story about
Pierre Wack, one of the executives in charge of Royal Dutch/Shell’s strategic planning
process in the early 1970s. Wack and his group started a process of visionary scenario
planning. They not only anticipated the global energy crisis that subsequently ensued,
but also planned the re-shaping of Royal Dutch/Shell’s organization to make it more
responsive to what they rightly forecast as a need to decentralize decision making to
address different market conditions in different parts of the world. The work Wack put
in motion enabled the company, which was the weakest of the seven largest oil com-
panies in 1970, to become one of the two strongest within ten years. Impressive, cer-
tainly. But what does this have to do with sustainable brokerage?
Wack and his group faced a classic problem of change management within an
organization. His group might have had a clear sense of the alternative market sce-
narios looming on the horizon, but how were they to disseminate what they knew was
coming in a way that would stick? How could they keep their scenario planning from
being viewed (and hence dismissed) through old paradigms or mental models of how
the oil business then operated? Wack’s reflections on this challenge are telling:
I cannot overemphasize this point: unless the corporate microcosm changes, manage-
rial behavior will not change; the internal compass must be recalibrated....
Our real target was the microcosms of our decision makers: unless we influenced the
mental image, the picture of reality held by critical decision makers, our scenarios
would be like water on stone.... 2
Wack’s strategy was simple and effective. He and his planning group presented key
decision makers with a business-as-usual scenario. They also pointed out the underly-
ing assumptions of that business-as-usual scenario. It was clear to all: those underly-
ing assumptions were simply untenable, depending on several “miracles” to occur
simultaneously. As Romm notes, “once managers saw that their faith in the status quo
was built on miracles, they were more receptive to new thinking.” 3
Pierre Wack was functioning as a broker in the most noble of ways—he was bro-
kering knowledge, conveying his vision of the future. But to make that knowledge
stick, he needed to first remove the old mental frame that would impede understand-
ing of his group’s scenario planning and then provide a new frame. Sustainable bro-
kerage begins with just this type of re-framing. But re-framing brokerage, as we will
see, is slightly different.