Editing Scenario planning (section)

===Business===
In the past, strategic plans have often considered only the "official future", which was usually a straight-line graph of current trends carried into the future. Often the trend lines were generated by the accounting department, and lacked discussions of demographics, or qualitative differences in social conditions.<ref name=":0" />

These simplistic guesses are surprisingly good most of the time, but fail to consider qualitative social changes that can affect a business or government. [[Paul J. H. Schoemaker]]  offers a strong managerial case for the use of scenario planning in business and had wide impact.<ref name="schoemaker1995">Schoemaker, Paul J.H. “Scenario Planning:  A Tool for Strategic Thinking,” ''Sloan Management Review''. Winter: 1995, pp. 25-40.</ref>

The approach may have had more impact outside Shell than within, as many others firms and consultancies started to benefit as well from scenario planning.  Scenario planning is as much art as science, and prone to a variety of traps (both in process and content) as enumerated by [[Paul J. H. Schoemaker]].<ref name="schoemaker1995" /> More recently scenario planning has been discussed as a tool to improve the strategic agility, by cognitively preparing not only multiple scenarios but also multiple consistent strategies.<ref name=":1" />