Shell Scenarios
Shell Scenarios uses Shell's own scenario planning history, and real cases like Mont Fleur and Dinokeng, to show what full scenario methodology looks like when it actually shaped a decision.
History unfolds in stages: Shell's own scenario work, then the real South African cases it inspired, not a hypothetical.
Reach for this when…
- A group is sceptical that scenario planning produces anything more than a workshop poster.
- You want to teach the method through a real precedent rather than theory alone.
- You're about to run full scenario planning and want the group to see it done properly first.
How to run it
- Introduce Shell's scenario planning history and approach.
- Frame the key question and planning horizon for this group.
- Apply the full methodology: rank driving forces by importance and uncertainty, take the two most critical as axes, and build out four scenarios.
- Walk through real cases, Mont Fleur and Dinokeng, as evidence of how scenarios shaped real decisions.
A worked example
Situation. Willem de Groot ran Maas Community Health, an NGO delivering rural clinics from Rotterdam, Netherlands, and his board was sceptical a scenario exercise would produce anything but a nice-looking document.
Applied. Before building his own scenarios, Willem walked the board through Mont Fleur, where scenario planning by a divided group in 1991-92 South Africa genuinely shifted how the country's transition was discussed.
Result. The board stopped treating the method as a workshop gimmick and took the funding-horizon scenarios they built afterwards seriously enough to change two years of budget planning.
The catch
Mont Fleur and Dinokeng are powerful stories precisely because they're unusual - most scenario exercises don't shift a national conversation, and leaning on them as a warm-up can set an expectation the actual session won't meet. The case studies also need real time to land properly, which gets cut first when the agenda runs long.
The Shell case studies persuade people scenarios work. They don't do the work of building your scenarios for you.
Origin: Royal Dutch Shell / Pierre Wack (scenario methodology); Adam Kahane (facilitated Mont Fleur, 1991-92, and Dinokeng, 2008-09)