Week 7: Why I Left Shell to Build Stormholt
Why I Left a 17-Year Shell Career to Build Stormholt
People think I am crazy.
Seventeen years at Shell. CI Deployment Manager across Malaysia, Aberdeen, and the UK. Part of programmes that delivered over $400 million in documented savings. A role that gave me access to some of the most sophisticated operational improvement infrastructure in the world. Global networks. Massive budgets. Teams of hundreds.
And I walked away from it.
Then CI Leader at Johnson Controls, across EMEA and Latin America. Head of CI at KCA Deutag, global drilling and engineering. Principal Consultant at Petrogenium, working with oil and gas clients who could write cheques with a lot of zeros.
I walked away from all of it.
Not because I was tired of CI. I will never be tired of CI. Watching someone on a shopfloor realise they can fix their own process -- that moment never gets old. Twenty-plus years in and it still gives me energy.
I walked away because I was tired of watching CI capability stay locked inside organisations that could afford it while everyone else struggled with problems that had known solutions.
The Moment It Hit Me
There was a specific moment. I can tell you exactly when it happened.
I was consulting for a mid-sized manufacturing company. Maybe 800 employees. Good people. Good product. Struggling with quality issues, delivery performance, and the usual operational chaos that comes from growing fast without building the operational infrastructure to support it.
They had tried CI before. Hired a consultancy. Got a nice report. Ran a few workshops. The consultancy left. Nothing stuck. Classic story.
I spent three days on their shopfloor. Within the first four hours, I could see at least ten significant improvements that would make an immediate difference. Not complex improvements. Not projects requiring statistical analysis or capital investment. Basic process improvements that anyone with CI experience would recognise instantly.
The changeover process had seven steps that could be done in parallel but were being done sequentially. The quality inspection was happening at the end of the line instead of at the point of origin. The daily planning meeting was 45 minutes of status updates and zero minutes of problem solving. The visual management board existed but had not been updated in six weeks.
These were problems with known solutions. Problems I had seen solved dozens of times at Shell, at Johnson Controls, at every large organisation with a mature CI programme. The solutions were not proprietary. They were not complex. They were not expensive.
But this company did not have access to them.
Not because the solutions were secret. Because the knowledge was trapped inside large corporate CI programmes, behind consulting fee walls, inside training courses that cost $15,000 per person, and in the heads of practitioners like me who had spent careers in organisations that could afford to invest in this capability.
That mid-sized manufacturer could not afford a $500,000 consulting engagement. They could not afford to send ten people to Black Belt training at $15,000 each. They could not afford to hire a full-time CI manager with 15 years of experience.
So they struggled with problems that had been solved a hundred times before, in a hundred other organisations, by people who had no way to share what they knew at a price point that made it accessible.
That was the moment.
What Shell Gave Me
I want to be clear about something. I am not bitter about my time at Shell. The opposite. Those 17 years gave me everything I have.
Shell gave me scale. A deployment across 12,000 FTEs taught me things about CI that you cannot learn from a textbook or a training course. How improvement cultures form and fracture. How cadence sustains when everything else is pushing against it. How to get an operator in Malaysia and a manager in Aberdeen aligned on the same improvement philosophy despite having almost nothing else in common.
Shell gave me rigour. Financial validation that was genuinely audited. Results that had to stand up to scrutiny. The discipline of documented savings where finance signed off and would challenge you if the numbers did not hold. That rigour shaped everything I do.
Shell gave me scars. I watched programmes fail. I watched great work get undone by a leadership change. I watched a team spend six months on an improvement only to have it reversed because a new manager did not understand why it had been done. Those scars taught me more than any success ever did.
Shell gave me the network. The practitioners, the mentors, the leaders who showed me what excellence actually looks like in practice. People who challenged me, taught me, and occasionally told me I was wrong when I needed to hear it.
I am grateful for every year. And I would not trade the experience for anything.
But Shell's CI capability was Shell's. It lived inside Shell's systems, Shell's infrastructure, Shell's knowledge management, Shell's training programmes. If you did not work at Shell -- or at one of the handful of large corporations with similar investment in CI -- you did not have access to it.
What I Saw on the Outside
When I left the large corporate world and started working with smaller organisations, the gap was staggering.
Companies with 200, 500, 1,000 employees. Good companies. Growing companies. Companies with real potential. And they were reinventing the wheel on problems that had been solved decades ago.
They were struggling with basic process standardisation. Not because they lacked intelligence. Because nobody had shown them how.
They were drowning in firefighting. Not because they enjoyed chaos. Because they had no structured problem-solving methodology. No cadence. No visual management. No escalation process.
They were losing money to waste they could not see. Not because the waste was hidden. Because they had never been taught how to look.
And the solutions available to them were either too expensive (hire a consultancy), too generic (read a book), or too disconnected from reality (take an online course with no application support).
The gap between what was available inside large corporate CI programmes and what was accessible to everyone else was enormous. And nobody was bridging it.
Why I Built Stormholt
Stormholt exists because of that gap.
I built it to take what I learned across 20+ years -- at Shell, at Johnson Controls, at KCA Deutag, at Petrogenium, across 40+ organisations and $1 billion in documented savings -- and make it accessible to people and organisations who could never afford a Big Four consulting engagement.
Not watered down. Not simplified to the point of uselessness. Not a "lite" version for people who cannot afford the real thing.
The real thing. The actual methodologies, tools, templates, and thinking frameworks that work in practice. Priced for a team leader, not a corporate training budget.
The CI Practitioner Mastery Programme has 16 modules because that is how many it takes to build genuine capability. Not because I wanted to pad the content. Because after training 300+ practitioners, I know exactly what you need to learn, in what order, with what kind of practice, to become someone who can walk into any process and make it better.
The templates and toolkits exist because I spent years watching practitioners waste time building their own tools from scratch when perfectly good ones already existed. Every template in the Stormholt toolkit is one I have used in real deployments, refined over years, tested across industries.
The 30-Day Starter Guide exists because I know that most people do not need 16 modules to begin. They need a starting point. A first step. Something that gets them moving today, not after a six-month training programme.
The Bet I Am Making
I am making a bet that CI capability should not be a luxury good.
That a team leader at a 200-person manufacturing company deserves the same quality of CI training that a Black Belt at Shell gets.
That the knowledge I accumulated over two decades should be working in the world, not locked in my head or buried in corporate knowledge management systems that nobody outside those companies will ever see.
That the biggest untapped opportunity in Continuous Improvement is not in the companies that already have it. It is in the millions of organisations that need it and do not know where to start.
That is Stormholt.
It is not a consulting firm. I am not here to do the improving for you. I am here to give you the capability to do it yourself. Because that is the only model that sustains. I learned that at Shell. The moment the consultant leaves, the improvement stops -- unless the capability has been transferred. My entire career taught me that lesson, and Stormholt is built on it.
I left a 17-year Shell career, followed by senior CI roles at some of the world's largest companies, because I believe that what I know should be available to everyone willing to do the work.
Here is my question: If you had access to the same CI methodology that delivered $400M+ in savings at Shell -- at a fraction of the cost -- what would you fix first in your organisation?
Start here. Stormholt makes world-class CI capability accessible to every organisation, regardless of size.
https://stormholt.org