For the past hundred years, an increasingly more interconnected world has created a global business context of significant opportunity and faster and more turbulent change. Despite ever more sophisticated approaches to corporate foresight, including horizon scanning, probabilistic forecasting, and complex systems analysis, business leaders still experience a sense of widespread failure to engage effectively with uncertainty.

More than forty-five years ago, Shell executives began to grapple with irreducible uncertainty by harnessing the longer-term perspective through the creation and use of alternative stories of the future – scenarios. Over time, Shell established an in-house team that produced a range of scenarios by engaging within and beyond the organization in a process that combined intuition with rigorous analysis. The Shell ‘narratives and numbers’ approach to scenarios focused variously on the long term, macro business environment, or ‘global’ context – developments in energy systems, specific regions (such as Russia), new challenges (such as sustainable development), and short-term crises (such as oil shocks, global economic recession, and pandemic flu). They also were occasionally designed to support specific investment decisions. In the process, Shell learned not only that oil prices were being shaped by a much wider set of factors and actors but also that organizational resilience requires a shared and systemic understanding of the wider business environment, not just speed of response. Adaptive capacity involves attention to culture, values, and relationships beyond the company, not just to tangible assets.

One of the key insights of the early years of Shell scenarios was that in order to survive and even thrive in a more dynamic and complex business era, it was important to expose and question deeply held assumptions, to engage with uncertainty as more than a lack of knowledge, and to attend to the quality of ‘strategic conversation’. Shell learned that the necessity for numbers and the precision of strategic analysis must be balanced with attention to the quality of the interpretive frames that Shell executives instinctively deployed in making sense of their changing world.