Shell Celebrates 40 Years of Scenarios

Shell Celebrates 40 Years of Scenarios PR Newswire THE HAGUE, The Netherlands, November 19, 2012 THE HAGUE, The Netherlands, November 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Scenario planning helps Shell make critical business decisions Forty years ago, in 1972, work began on what many people regard as the first Shell Scenarios document, published the following year, though the roots of this work lie even further in the past. Since then, scenario planning has been at the heart of Shell's business, developing senior leadership understanding of critical factors in the business environment and the possible directions which economic, geopolitical and social systems could take, decades into the future. In the last four decades, Shell Scenario planners have highlighted many key world trends and discontinuities, ensuring that Shell as a business has been able to plan for several eventualities and maintain business continuity through even the most turbulent times. For example, the original Scenarios helped Shell's leaders to prepare for the possibility of an oil price shock - a prescient move given the Yom Kippur war, which broke out in October 1973. Jeremy Bentham, Shell's Vice President, Global Business Environment, said: "Ever since our Scenarios programme began forty years ago, we have been creating and applying many different scenarios to anticipate global and local economic, social and political changes and how they could affect our business.