It’s no secret that if Canada’s energy sector wants to meaningfully reduce its environmental footprint, it, will have to lean heavily on technological improvements to boost efficiency and decrease the intensity of emissions.

This isn’t just about altruism, either. With these improvements, the sector could improve its cost structure, increase competitiveness and grow its global market share, especially if (or when) a global price on carbon is implemented.

And if it can’t? Well, it could make the National Energy Program look like a minor inconvenience.

Richard Adamson, managing director of CMC Research Institutes, thinks that finding a way to more effectively integrate technological innovation into the energy sector is an urgent goal – and one that we can’t afford to wait on much longer.

“There’s been a real tendency to minimize the importance of transitioning to a low-carbon future,” Adamson said. “I think we’re on the cusp of making a transition around that globally that will absolutely require that we not only move quickly, but be seen to be moving quickly in that area. We can’t be complacent there – the tools don’t exist now that we will need to be implementing on a large scale in the very near future.”

The real challenge, Adamson said, isn’t so much developing those transformative technologies, but in getting the energy sector to adopt and adapt them quickly enough.

That’s a function of the inherently and (understandably) conservative attitude towards risk in the energy sector.

“There’s a great deal of risk intolerance, and that’s probably appropriate except that there’s a tendency to have very slow processes in getting to the de-risking,” Adamson said. “It isn’t the actual building or designing of the equipment or the test programs themselves that take a lot of time. It’s the decision-making processes that get you there that take the time. We need to figure out how to make decisions a lot more quickly and effectively.”

The organizers of the Canada 3.0 program at this year’s Canadian Energy Supply Chain Forum hope they can make progress on that front at an innovative 90-minute workshop.

After two days spent learning about both the barriers to innovation in the energy sector and how Canada’s technology sector can overcome them, conference participants will be encouraged to take that knowledge and put it to work in a format known as “inspired conversations.”

What’s so inspired about them? Well, for starters, you don’t have to prepare, bring any additional material or toe the company line. You just have to come ready to talk and willing to engage. And because the conversation is being conducted under so-called “Chatham House Rules,” everything that’s said will be anonymous and unattributable.

“I think it helps to put people somewhat at ease in that they’re free to speak their own mind,” said Dale Austin, co-founder and principal at Tessellate Inc. and an architect of the workshop’s format. “They might have slightly different views than the corporation they work for on this issue, and they’re freed up to talk about it in that way.”

Another inspired aspect of the conversation is that it’s not limited to engineers and executives.

“It would be good to have people from as wide a variety of different perspectives come in as possible,” Adamson said. “One of the big issues is that innovation and adoption of new technologies is looked at through different eyes in different areas of the organization.”

Indeed, Adamson said, the biggest obstacle to adoption of new technology often isn’t technical in nature.

“We need to be thinking about all elements. Not just ‘is it technically good enough,’ but how does it fit into the overall procurement process of the organization? And what does each element of the organization bring to the table in terms of the assessment of risk and uncertainty? Because in almost all cases, if you’re talking to somebody about barriers to acceptance, it boils down to an uncertainty problem for somebody in the organization.”

But perhaps paradoxically, given the stakes involved, there’s no predetermined objective to the conversations that will take place.

“We’re not looking for a result,” Austin said. “The idea is to have this conversation about this particular issue and to learn more about the various views that happen to be in the room at that time.”

That conversation doesn’t necessarily have to end after the session is over, either.

“What we seem to find is that the inspired conversation is the starting point of activities that grow over time,” he said. “It’s not until you look back at where it all started that you can pinpoint it, but this idea of getting people talking about a particular issue and getting a community of people together that are interested and building a network, then all of a sudden these things kind of branch out from this initial conversation.”

Space in the workshop will be limited, so Canada 3.0 participants interested in attending are encouraged to sign up here in advance.