The origins of scenario planning are widely ascribed to Cold War futurist Herman Kahn at RAND Corporation. SRI was among the first to formalize the technique and give it broad utility in decision-making by businesses and governments. Major corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell, ARCO, and DuPont have used SRI’s approach.
Scenario planning is still used widely to model future business conditions, including technology advances, consumer behavior, and socio-economic shifts. Strategic Business Insights, an SRI spin-off company, provides scenario-planning services.
