There Is No Alternative to ...

When they looked at the Middle East, the team saw oil-rich nations that were too small to absorb the wealth that they were generating. That growing surplus of cash would have to be reinvested. But where? No bank asset or piece of real estate could appreciate in value as fast as the oil in the ground. And if more oil stayed in the ground to keep the price high, the value would only increase. Wack and his team perceived the emergence of OPEC and the rising price of oil to be tendances lourdes that would drive the global system for the next 10 years.

Since those early successes, Shell's scenario unit -- now called Global Business Environment (GBE) -- has produced three new scenarios each year. The exercise has produced more than its share of insights. A decade after Wack's OPEC scenarios, his successor, Peter Schwartz, identified Mikhail Gorbachev -- not even a politburo member at that time -- as a reformer who would lead the Soviet Union through sweeping changes. While the rest of the West was stunned in 1989 by the sudden fall of communism in that region, Shell was wondering why the process had taken so long. With Collyns and three others, Schwartz later cofounded the influential Global Business Network and turned scenario planning into a commercial venture with his how-to guide, The Art of the Long View (Doubleday, 1991).

But as scenario planning has broken into the mainstream, Wack's original emphasis on perception and intuition has been diluted. For many companies, the work of identifying driving forces has become just another bullet point on a formulaic guide to building scenarios. "Many of the people using scenarios are doing so in a trivial way with little impact," says Schwartz. "The risk is that as more people do scenario planning, it will be done poorly, and the credibility of the method will suffer."

TINA Checks In

In the summer of 1995, Roger Rainbow was pacing the floor of Wack's old office. Shell's reputation was in tatters. Television viewers had just seen footage of the company turning high-pressure fire hoses on Greenpeace protesters as they clung to the Brent Spar, a redundant rig that Shell wanted to ditch in the North Atlantic. Just as disturbing were news reports from the Niger Delta, where much of Shell's oil was drilled. The Nigerian government was quashing a peaceful uprising against the company. It was an ugly international situation that culminated in the government's hanging of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa.

As GBE leader, Rainbow felt that somehow, scenario planning had to address the new as-yet-unnamed reality that was catching Shell off guard. The last round of scenarios in 1992 had acknowledged the forces of globalization and liberalization being felt around the world. To Rainbow, it seemed clear that those two forces were now irresistible. No alternative model competed with the emerging consensus about the value of open markets. What's more, the consensus had gathered strength through the globalizing influence of technology. Shell and companies like it would be in the spotlight as never before. Markets would be global -- but so would protest movements.

Globalization. Liberalization. Technology. A power-trio supergroup for the late 1990s. "In an offhand way, Roger began saying, 'There is no alternative to these forces,' " recalls Betty Sue Flowers, scenario editor for Shell for the last four rounds. " 'TINA.' I wrote it up that way, with the understanding that the name would be taken out in the final edit. But it stuck."

TINA. There is no alternative. TINA issued an ultimatum. Manage the challenges and grasp the opportunities that she presented -- or fail. TINA would enable businesses to gain power and influence. But with that newfound power would come both responsibility and accountability, a requirement to wield that power as a force for good in the world. Not all multinational companies would welcome such a role. But whether they liked it or not, it would be expected of them.

"These forces were so powerful and all shaping that there was no alternative for Shell but to deal with them as a number-one priority and to make a strategic response," recalls Rainbow, who is now semiretired, splitting his time between homes in Spain and England. "In a world of uncertainty, scenarios provide focus on things you can't duck."