The org chart is the easy part.

At a glance

Challenge

A new corporate strategy demanded a simpler, customer-first Downstream organisation, at the precise moment the pandemic had turned the business inside out.

Andrew’s role

VP of Organisation Development & Learning for Shell’s Downstream business, and for eighteen months the Reshape programme lead: accountable for taking Downstream through the redesign end to end, leading a 300-plus cross-functional programme team.

Scale / context

Around 30,000 roles in scope across five global businesses, with formal consultation across dozens of countries, and a single go-live date of 1 August 2021.

What changed

Roughly a billion dollars of structural cost out, organisational layers cut from eleven to eight or nine, spans of control up, and five redesigned businesses live on schedule with business continuity intact.

In 2020 Shell set a new strategy and asked its global Downstream business to become simpler, leaner and customer-first, in the middle of a pandemic. I led Reshape for Downstream, the programme that redesigned a business of tens of thousands of people and took roughly a billion dollars out of its cost base, while the business kept running.

A strategy written in a storm

2020 was the strangest year the oil industry had ever seen. In April the US oil price went negative for the first time in history. Shell cut its dividend for the first time since the Second World War. And inside Downstream, Shell’s customer-facing business, the pandemic pulled the portfolio in opposite directions at once: Trading & Supply thrived on the volatility while demand for fuels, lubricants and chemicals fell away as the world stopped moving.

Into that storm Shell announced Powering Progress, its strategy for the energy transition, and in September 2020 told the world it would restructure, cutting up to 9,000 roles group-wide. Reshape was the programme that did it, running across the company, Upstream and Projects & Technology alongside Downstream. I led it for Downstream: a redesign of that business end to end against three principles, enabling the strategy, streamlining the organisation, and making its cost base competitive. Every strategy is a bet on the organisation that has to deliver it. This was Shell placing that bet, publicly, in the worst market of a generation.

Three principles, five businesses

The design put strategy first and cost second, in that order deliberately. Downstream was rebuilt into five global businesses, each with a clear role in the strategy: a combined Chemicals & Products organisation merging the legacy manufacturing and chemicals businesses around one asset footprint; Trading & Supply confirmed as the optimiser across Shell’s value chains; a new Sectors & Decarbonisation business built to help customers decarbonise industry by industry; Lubricants stood up as a standalone business with end-to-end profit accountability in each region; and Mobility carrying the consumer proposition, including the scale-up of e-mobility.

That portfolio set the tension the design had to hold. The same redesign had to grow Trading & Supply and stand up a new decarbonisation business while shrinking the manufacturing footprint, in the same twelve months, with the same programme team and a single go-live date. A cost programme would have cut evenly. A strategy programme had to cut and invest at once, and say so plainly to the people in both halves.

The organisational design principles were as explicit as the portfolio ones. Fewer, better leaders: the senior leadership population came down by around a fifth. Fewer layers: from eleven to eight or nine. Wider spans, fewer one-and-two-person teams, less seniority reporting to identical seniority. More local talent and fewer expatriates, and a leadership population that looked more like its markets, with a better gender balance and its weight closer to customers in Asia and the Americas.

Delivery decided it

Designing the structure took months. Making it real took the better part of a year, and that was the part that decided whether Reshape was a strategy or a press release.

That was my seat. My day job was VP of Organisation Development & Learning for Downstream; for eighteen months of it I led the Reshape programme for Downstream: a 300-plus cross-functional team of business leaders and specialists in organisation design, HR, business readiness, finance and value tracking, change and communications, working to the Downstream executive committee so the pieces landed as one organisation rather than five.

I was part of the central team who wrote how the programme was to be run, as a book and chapters. The book was Reshape end to end; the chapters were its phases: strategic options, conceptual design, detailed design, then a phased, orchestrated implementation to a single go-live on 1 August 2021, with explicit executive sign-off at every gate along the way. Every business ran the same approach, especially given the common constraints such as works councils, and the operating-model interdependencies that ran across the businesses. That is what stopped a five-business redesign becoming five programmes, and it is why each business signed off its own readiness rather than having it declared for them.

Resourcing tens of thousands of roles ran through structured selection rounds, with placement windows deliberately frozen and thawed so the organisation was not reorganising itself faster than people could be treated properly. Formal consultation ran across dozens of countries, each with its own works councils, legal requirements and rhythms.

Before go-live, the new operating model was tested rather than trusted. Leadership-sponsored scenarios pushed water through the pipes of the design: a jet fuel mandate in France, a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, an electric-vehicle offer crossing three businesses. Each scenario walked the new interfaces end to end, and each one surfaced actions to fix before day one rather than after, with three readiness reviews gating the final months.

Then the discipline that most reorganisations skip: a defined hypercare period after go-live with explicit, measurable exit criteria, from clean financial closes to system access rates, so the programme ended when the organisation was stable rather than when the team was tired. The programme was then deliberately decommissioned: records archived, an after-action review conducted and shared, and the new operating model handed to the line. A transformation that cannot survive without its programme team has not finished.

The care and the candour

Two things about Reshape stay with me more than the numbers.

The first is that care for people was treated as a design constraint, not a communications line. In a redesign where thousands of people would leave, the sequencing of selection rounds, the freeze windows and the consultation calendar were built around treating people properly, and where the machinery fell short of that standard, the shortfall was named.

The second is the candour. Within weeks of go-live, before anyone had stopped congratulating themselves, the leadership team commissioned an honest lessons-learnt review and shared it internally. I would name three things myself. It took too long, and uncertainty is expensive: good people leave while they wait. HR systems built for steady state do not bend to change at that scale. And the boxes got months of attention while the businesses inside them got weeks, which is the wrong way round. Very few organisations tell themselves the truth about a transformation they have just declared a success. It is the single strongest predictor I know of whether the next one goes better.

What it delivered

Reshape delivered its commitment: roughly a billion dollars out of Downstream’s structural cost base against the 2019 baseline, through a simpler organisation rather than an across-the-board cut, with reinvestment ring-fenced for the growth businesses the strategy needed. The organisation went live on schedule, month-end closes ran clean, and the five businesses it created carried Shell’s customer-facing strategy into the energy transition. After go-live my own remit widened to cover Integrated Gas and New Energies alongside Downstream.

What I learned

Guiding principles

1. 01

   The org chart is the easy part. The operating model, the interfaces, the ways of working and the people processes are the work.

2. 02

   Fewer, better leaders beats fewer leaders. Cost targets met by deleting roles come back; cost targets met by redesigning leadership hold.

3. 03

   Test the water through the pipes. Scenario-test the new organisation against real events before go-live, with executives sponsoring the tests, not delegating them.

4. 04

   Care for people is a design constraint. Build the timeline around treating people properly, or the organisation will remember how it was treated long after it forgets the strategy.

5. 05

   End the programme on evidence, not exhaustion. Explicit hypercare exit criteria, deliberate decommissioning, and a handover to the line.

6. 06

   Hold the after-action review even when you won. Especially when you won.

Why it matters now

Most large organisations are now contemplating a redesign of similar consequence, driven by a mix of pressures of which AI is only the loudest. The pattern does not change with the cause: a public strategy, an organisation that has to deliver it, and a market that will not pause while you get ready. Reshape is what that discipline looks like at full scale.