100 GREAT BUSINESS IDEAS • 5Scenario planning enables organizations to rehearse the future,
to walk the battlefi eld before battle commences so that they are
better prepared. Scenarios are not about predicting future events.
Their value lies in helping businesses understand the forces that are
shaping the future. They challenge our assumptions.
The idea
In the 1960s, Pierre Wack, Royal Dutch/Shell’s head of group
planning, asked executives to imagine tomorrow. This promoted
sophisticated and responsive strategic thinking about the current
situation, by enabling them to detect and understand changes.
Pierre Wack wanted to know whether there were other factors in the
supply of oil, besides technical availability, that might be uncertain
in the future. He listed stakeholders and questioned the position
of governments in oil-producing countries: would they continue
increasing production year on year? By exploring the possible
changes to government policy, it became apparent that these
governments were unlikely to remain amenable to Shell’s activities.
Many oil-producing countries did not need an increase in income.
They had the upper hand, and the overwhelming logic for the oil-
producing countries was to reduce supply, increase prices, and
conserve their reserves.
When the 1973 Arab–Israeli War limited the supply of oil, prices
rose fi vefold. Fortunately for Shell, Wack’s scenario work meant
Shell was better prepared than its competitors to adapt to the new
situation—saving billions of dollars, it climbed from seventh to