The Origins of Scenario Development

This is an extract from my PhD thesis that provides a summary overview of the origins of scenario development.

This is an extract from my PhD thesis that provides a summary overview of the origins of scenario development. Warning: it’s a long read with references, so you can download a PDF version by clicking the red button.

If you cite or re-use anything from this extract, please use the following as a reference: Maree Conway, Foresight Futures, 2021. Thanks.

The origin of scenario development as it is understood today is commonly attributed to the work of Pierre Wack and his colleagues at Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) in the early 1970s when they began to experiment with scenario development. The RAND Corporation and General Electric (Bradfield et al. 2005; Chermack & Coons 2015) were also using scenario development, and the work of Herman Kahn on forecasting and storytelling at RAND was drawn on by Wack in the development of Shell’s scenario approach (Wack, 1984). The history of how scenarios came to be used at Shell is covered well by van der Heijden et al. (2002) and more recently, by Wilkinson…