Why scenarios?

Nowadays, decision-making has become far more complex than ever before, taking place in a fast changing, highly uncertain information-driven environment where values, behaviours, and social structures are no longer as stable and predictable as they were. The complexity of the environment undermines our ability to understand what the future will look like. Traditional planning and forecasting practices on their own are not enough to serve our needs in getting the insights and answers to the future. Accountable decision making requires a high element of certainty - an adequate level of knowledge and confidence in our assumptions about that knowledge. Thus the ability for an organisation to critically review its assumptions on external developments and to incorporate thinking about external uncertainties in a structured way is of key importance. Scenario Thinking, introduced by Shell Group Planning in the 1970s, has evolved as a powerful methodology to enable groups to structurally anticipate change and incorporate external uncertainty into the internal decision making process.