Business Unusual: Learning in Lockdown with Shell

As a speaker for the upcoming Connected Worker ONLINE event (July 27-29), we sat down with Brent to find out more about how Covid-19 has impacted Shell's learning and innovation projects. 

The event is FREE to attend for In House Industry professionals - register online here. 

OGIQ: How has Covid-19 impacted learning and innovation projects at Shell?

Brent: At the time of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, LinkedIn was the only notable social media platform. The world had no Facebook or iPhones and certainly no Zoom. The social medial footprint in the US stood at under 5 percent, and globally it was less. Besides having significantly greater impact on the world’s social, economic and political strains, Covid-19 is also the first viral pandemic outbreak of the digital/social media era and proving to be a watershed moment for both digitization and virtualization.

Today, Covid-19 is viewed as a universal epidemic bringing catastrophe on a magnitude not seen in decades. It’s frightening to imagine the global impact if Covid-19 started to spread in 2003 without the resources that we have available to us in 2020. Now imagine if we had spent that last 17 years preparing for the all too familiar constraints that Covid-19 has placed on both society and industry.

Shell has been investing to build a thoughtful portfolio of digital and virtual learning innovations across a wide array of use cases. We realized the benefit of delivering innovation in organizational learning capabilities, and have worked quickly to integrate those competencies into our organization. However, there is more work to do, especially in response to the constraints and context of a pandemic outbreak.

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Brent will be speaking more on this at the upcoming Connected Worker ONLINE event - free to attend for In House Industry professionals. Secure your place here. 

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As we await the lifting of lockdown, the emphasis now must be on accelerating our capacity to deliver on the promises of Industry 4.0 (IOT, digitalization, remote), with the aim to not only deliver sufficient countermeasures to constraints but, more importantly, address our vulnerabilities. This now requires accepting some hard truths about the field of organisational learning and development. We must recognize, accept and address
institutional issues that as an industry exist through years of succumbing to the status quo. My reflections during lockdown focused primarily on what we got right, wrong, and how can we remake ourselves:

1. What can we learn from how we have
   embraced the opportunities of Industry 4.0?
2. How do we effectively change the narrative
   regarding the corporate learning agenda?
3. What are the constraints beyond respiratory
   distancing that the next scenario may bring?

To read the full interview and hear more from Brent and the future of Shell's innovation and learning projects, download the interview here.