page numbers from Strategy: Critical Perspectives an Business and Management, Volume 2, David Faulkner
p.91 the way to solve this problem [inaccurate forecasts] is not to look for better forecasts by
perfecting techniques or hiring more or better forecasters. Too many forces work against the possibility of getting
the right forecast. The future is no longer stable; it has become a moving target. No single "right" projection can
be deduced from past behavior.
The better approach, I believe, is to accept uncertainty, try to understand it, and make it part
of our reasoning. Uncertainty today... is a basic structural feature of the business environment. The method used
to think about and plan for the future must be made appropriate to a changed business environment.
Royal Dutch/Shell believes that decision scenarios are such a method.
p.91 Scenarios help managers structure uncertainty when (1) they are based on a sound analysis of reality,
and (2) they change the decision makers' assumptions about how the world works and compel them to reorganize their mental
model of reality.
p.96 In 1971, Shell therefore decided to try scenario planning
as a potentially better framework for thinking about the future than forecasts - which were now perceived as a dangerous
substitute for real thinking in times of uncertainty and potential discontinuity.
p.98 Strictly speaking, you can forecast the future only when all of its elements are predetermined...
there are seldom enough of them to permit a single-line forecast that encompasses residual uncertainties.
Decision makers facing uncertain situations have a right to know just how uncertain they are.
p.98-99 To understand the fluctuations that give the oil system its character and determine its future,
we had to understand the forces that drive it... we began to study the characters on the stage and how they would behave as
the drama unfolded.
p.105 Having all these building blocks, we could begin to understand the forces driving the system.
p.113 We had set out to produce not a scenario booklet simply summarizing views but a
change in the way managers view their world.
