Glenn's blog

For the past 40 years or so, Royal Dutch Shell has been using "scenarios" to plan and better react to world events. In the time since they developed their first scenarios, they moved from one of the smallest energy companies in the world to one of the largest, if not the largest.

I don't know much about them as a company beyond this, so I can't speak to any of their other business practices.

I've read a few books by former members of scenario planning teams at Royal Dutch Shell. The scenario teams they put together include some of the smartest people in the world. They've made a great deal of their scenario information available to the public on their website, too.

I wonder if animal rights activists could use this process to evaluate possible scenarios and guide ourselves to a future that we want to create? Shell's scenarios involved years of research and a great deal of resources, but there must be ways we could put together less detailed and simpler scenarios that would still be useful and help to guide us.

I think that even the act of getting a group together and working on a project like this would help us all — if for nothing more than helping the people involved learn how to look at and evaluate complex systems.

What do you think?

Some resources

Scenario Planning on Wikipedia
Shell's scenarios
Scenarios: An Explorer's Guide