Our fascination with the future reaches back millennia through oracles, visionaries, and utopians. Yet the future remains elusive. For example, Arthur Brehmer's The World in 100 Years, published in 1910, gets every prediction wrong, with the exception of the pocket phone.

Even if we can't predict the future, a willingness and capacity to engage with new and different possibilities can help clarify the otherwise overwhelming messiness of continuous change. Modern foresight practices provide a rich choice of dealing with futures – the probable, the preferable, and the plausible. One of the most important of these practices is scenario building. Scenarios maintain the future as an open, but not an empty space, where facts, expectations, and perceptions intermingle, and a combination of critical, creative, and analytical thinking is essential.

While the common corporate practice is to produce one-off scenarios, Shell has a nearly fifty-year tradition of creating long-term scenarios in the face of market-induced short-termism. Other books on Shell scenarios have been written by such notable Shell scenarists as Peter Schwartz, Kees van der Heijden, and Adam Kahane, each offering insights based on direct experiences at different points in the Shell scenario history. With this book, we trace the complete history from multiple perspectives of Shell executives, scenario team leaders, and others, and highlight an overlooked legacy.

Shell has pioneered and sustained the use of scenarios in a commercial setting from 1965 until today. We look back on almost a half-century of scenario practice and ask: What has worked, what has changed, and what has been learned?

The development of scenarios in Shell grew out of a realization that long-term forecasting in business is too unreliable. After a period of experimentation, scenarios emerged as part of an alternative planning approach. Initially, scenarios were created by a few individuals; eventually, however, scenarios began to be shaped by a broad cast of key players, many of whom were outside the scenario team.