Adapting Decision Making for Accelerated Emission Reduction

INSEAD Global Energy Day 2021 Keynote

June 16, 2021

In this keynote presentation, Ben Moens and Sesilia Plavina shared use cases where established decision-making practices constrain a corporation’s ability to act at speed and scale on emissions reduction, and how organizations can establish a more effective decision paradigm with new insights, decision frameworks, and operating models.

To meet 2030 and 2050 climate objectives, corporations need to act swiftly. Our sustainability consultants walked through real-world examples and expert perspectives on the following topics:

• Current state assessment: Each stakeholder in a corporation has his or her own considerations in realizing emission reduction.
• Adapting existing processes: Our experience shows that adapting each stakeholder’s decision-making process is critical to reaching an organization’s goals.
  
• Holistic strategies: Decision-makers need to shift from siloed thinking to holistic and integrated solutions.
• Total Cost of Ownership: Corporations need to shift from ROI-based prioritization to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)-based scenario selection.
• Modularization: Corporations can capture synergies and drive scalable emission reduction transformations through modularization.

Video Transcript

Edited for clarity

Q: How can corporations effectively scale sustainability transformation?

A: Ben Moens: We see today that in a majority of companies, operations is asked to build a roadmap for individual sites, and do their homework to see what technologies make sense. We really believe that this is not the best process. This approach gets you stuck in very individual localized solutions.

Every site will probably adopt different solutions to work with different vendors, which means that you don’t have a way of capturing the synergies that you can get by using a standardized solution.

What we see as the best way forward for corporations is, that instead of launching individual initiatives across all of your footprints you should first work with a couple of flagship locations to solve the question of how to get to the right end state and understand what scenario will get you there. From there, it's easy to then shift these pilot insights into a technology module library. It takes the pilot location insights and shows how scalable these technologies are. An additional benefit of scaling includes driving economies of scale of the project lifecycle from engineering and design, all the way to operations and maintenance.

I use scaling as a basis to spot opportunities to drive down the cost of the overall transition. That is, on the basis we do a site clustering of operational characteristics and a larger footprint assessment to spot where we have the most potential to drive emission reduction.

Once you do that assessment and see where the conditions are right to reduce emissions at the lowest possible cost, and only then scale up to the rest of your footprint, you're in a much better position to drive change and have a more agile deployment.

Register to Watch the On-Demand Recording