Most businesses are less than forty-five years old, the average tenure of the CEO is getting shorter, and fads and fashion in strategy don't last a decade. Shell's reputation for disciplined imagination as a basis for long-term thinking is therefore all the more surprising in an engineering-orientated business culture. Sustaining a practice for over forty-five years is even more remarkable. In grappling with accelerating change, irreducible uncertainty, and genuine complexity the Shell scenario practice has engaged intuition, in combination with rigorous analysis, to redirect attention from businessas- usual projections to novel changes and discontinuities, to reveal and test deeply held assumptions about the future, to build shared understanding, and to engrain a disciplined approach to ‘gut feeling’.

Scenarios in Shell play an essential role in helping executives and others ‘see’ problematic situations with clarity and ‘seed’ the future (that is, develop more and better options), making space for conflict and disagreement and developing new systems of vigilance that enable more efficient horizon scanning and the trap of confirmation bias – looking only for signs that things are going as expected.

From ‘Seeing’ to ‘Seeding’, Not Growing Better Futures