Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4rdrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-07T19:56:00.002Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: The “Gentle Art”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2021

Get access

Summary

Those who tell the future lie, even if they tell the truth.

– Arab proverb derived from the Koran

The search for discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

– Marcel Proust

The most striking part of the story – that we could not predict – has no effect on our confidence in individual cases.

– Daniel Kahneman

Our fascination with the future reaches back millennia through oracles, visionaries, and utopians. Yet the future remains elusive. For example, Arthur Brehmer's The World in 100 Years, published in 1910, gets every prediction wrong, with the exception of the pocket phone.

Even if we can't predict the future, a willingness and capacity to engage with new and different possibilities can help clarify the otherwise overwhelming messiness of continuous change. Modern foresight practices provide a rich choice of dealing with futures – the probable, the preferable, and the plausible. One of the most important of these practices is scenario building. Scenarios maintain the future as an open, but not an empty space, where facts, expectations, and perceptions intermingle, and a combination of critical, creative, and analytical thinking is essential.

While the common corporate practice is to produce one-off scenarios, Shell has a nearly fifty-year tradition of creating long-term scenarios in the face of market-induced short-termism. Other books on Shell scenarios have been written by such notable Shell scenarists as Peter Schwartz, Kees van der Heijden, and Adam Kahane, each offering insights based on direct experiences at different points in the Shell scenario history. With this book, we trace the complete history from multiple perspectives of Shell executives, scenario team leaders, and others, and highlight an overlooked legacy.

Shell has pioneered and sustained the use of scenarios in a commercial setting from 1965 until today. We look back on almost a half-century of scenario practice and ask: What has worked, what has changed, and what has been learned?

The development of scenarios in Shell grew out of a realization that long-term forecasting in business is too unreliable. After a period of experimentation, scenarios emerged as part of an alternative planning approach. Initially, scenarios were created by a few individuals; eventually, however, scenarios began to be shaped by a broad cast of key players, many of whom were outside the scenario team.

Type
Chapter
Information
Essence of Scenarios
Learning from the Shell Experience
, pp. 13 - 16
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×