Foundations of Scenario Planning

The Story of Pierre Wack

Thomas Chermack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317279396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Forecasting
• Index: Business

Pierre Wack was head of scenario planning at Royal Dutch / Shell Oil in London for just over ten years. He died in 1997. He was a pioneer of what we know today as scenario planning – an alternative and complement to strategic planning.

Scenarios explore a variety of possible futures for examining decisions in organizational planning. Pierre was a unique man with interests in Indian and Japanese cultures and traditions. He travelled extensively and led a unique life that involved long periods of visiting gurus in India and extended sabbaticals in Japan. His experiences with Eastern thought no doubt shaped his ability to evolve the scenario method at Shell, and as a result he was able to lead a team that foresaw the oil crises of the 1970's and 80's.

This new volume will cover the basic context of his life timeline and attach it to the development of his thinking about scenario planning over the course of his career. After his death, Wack's materials, papers and documents were collected by Napier Collyns and have recently been made available at the University of Oxford where the Pierre Wack Memorial Library has been established. These documents contain a variety of clues and stories that reveal more about who Pierre Wack was, how he thought and will provide details about scenario planning that have never been seen or published. They also reveal a curious man and include a timeline written by his wife, Eve, which details their relationship over the course of 40 years.

Written for management and business historians and researchers, this book will uncover unseen contributions by a scenario planning pioneer shaped by significant events in his personal life that helped him to see the world differently.

Foreword, Part 1

Pierre Wack changed my life! I had been slowly climbing the ladder at Royal Dutch Shell and was in my forties when my boss at the time Karel Swart who was the Managing Director responsible for Planning called me to The Hague and told me he wanted me to go to London and work with “a crazy Frenchman”. “Where is he?” I asked. “He is in Japan on a sabbatical,” he said “But he will soon be in London and we want you to work with him.” I soon met Pierre Wack for an interview and the only thing he asked was “What can’t you do?”. “I can’t write a book” I said. The irony was that I was to work with Pierre and Ted Newland on and off for the next thirty years or so, first in Shell and later in Global Business Network and none of us ever wrote a book. But by now there have been numerous books written about the scenario practice we first developed in those days.

This is the first book written that is truly dedicated to Pierre and I hope it will enable me to share with you how he changed my life. It didn’t have much to do with business or the bottom line. There was just simply a presence about him that was immediately something you felt. You couldn’t be around him and look for certainty. The only thing certain about being with Pierre was that on his desk he would have a little holder for a small stick with a glow at the end. He always had this marvelous incense burning which would pervade the whole room. It was difficult not to feel a sense of magic when you were with Ted or Pierre or not to believe what they were saying however unlikely.

A few years after our Shell days I was visiting Pierre at his chateau La Johannie in Curemonte in the Dordogne in central France. We were sitting in his beautiful garden when he produced a few pieces of paper and said “I‘d like you to read this.” He gave me the pages, which were in French, and it was about the gurus he had met over the years. It started with Gurdjieff and a few others, and covered several failed attempts at finding a match until it finally described how he met this special guru, whom he eventually shared with a number of other French people interested in Asian mysticism. One of these, Daniel Roumanoff, decided to write a book about the guru and collected stories of their experiences with this special guru and asked Pierre to contribute his own story to the collection. I sat there in the sun, with Pierre’s favorite sunflowers in full bloom and was captivated by the words of my friend who did not like to write. While I was reading Pierre said to me, “Look I really learned to see with the guru and having learned to see, I was able when I joined the Shell Group in London to see the world in a way no one else had done”. He went on further, “Although the guru knew nothing about oil prices or the Royal Dutch Shell Group, he really helped me see the things they needed to see.” When I got to the end he leant over and snatched the four pages right out of my hands. “That’s not for you, Napier”. So for several years I was wondering if I would ever see them again.

The last time I saw Pierre was in 1997 when he was with his wife in a nursing home owned by his father-in-law near Chartres. I arrived early so I spent a couple of hours in Chartres Cathedral with an amazing man who knew every inch of this most beautiful building. I was in a special mood when I reached Pierre and after giving him some papers to read I asked him in front of his wife Eve whether I could preserve what I could of his personal papers. He seemed excited by this prospect and a few weeks after he died I went with my wife and our friend Don Michael to stay with Eve at Curemonte. After two or three days we had sorted Pierre’s papers into three categories: the personal, professional and esoteric. Eve kept the personal and esoteric papers but had translated into English the four pages I longed to read and which I have shared with many people since. We packed up the professional books and papers and shipped them to The Hague where we kept them in the GBN office opposite the Queen’s Palace. Cynthia Selin helped me sort them out and when she went to Copenhagen to work on her doctorate she wrote the first deep account of Pierre’s work: Professional Dreamers.

After a few years GBN had to give up its library space and our close friend Kees van der Heijden suggested we give the collection to Templeton College. Kees was then working there and it had been the location of the first business school at Oxford University. In due course Templeton merged with Green College to form Green Templeton College in the centre of Oxford. In May 2014 the Pierre Wack Memorial Library was officially opened at Oxford University under a partnership arrangement between Green Templeton College and the Said Business School with professional help from the Sainsbury Wing of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. This book is heavily based on materials which the library maintains and have not been published elsewhere, and it is supplemented by interviews with former colleagues of Pierre. Increasingly the library is being used for research on the development of scenarios and Pierre Wack’s contributions.

There is no question that Pierre Wack was a charismatic figure who changed the way many companies have tended to deal with the future. It is true that not every scenario exercise will result in profound insight, but commitment to the process over time cannot but change the future of any company. In today’s world, scenarios are more relevant than ever, and the lessons we might take from considering the life of scenario’s most enigmatic figure will not be easy. But if we pay attention, accept the nature of today’s reality and dedicate our efforts to really thinking about the future, we cannot but help come away with a different way of seeing the world. I should like to thank Tom Chermack, whom I first met with Cynthia Selin in Arizona at a conference on the plausibility of scenarios, for the amazing effort he has made to track down the story of Pierre Wack and to help us all better understand his achievement. Pierre always believed that an understanding of history was essential for studying the future. In the same spirit as the dedication of this book it is my great hope that Pierre’s story will provide a foundation and inspiration for the next generation of scenario planners.

I can think of no better way to introduce Pierre or this book than by providing those four pages that enthralled me so long ago. I hope they are as much an inspiration to you as they have been to me.

Napier Collyns

London, 2016

Foreword, Part 2

Pierre Wack’s “Four Pages”

Original text

Pierre Wack, born in 1922, met Svamiji for the first time in the spring of 1961. He was the first Frenchman who ever visited the Channa ashram.

“Before meeting Svamiji,” Pierre tells us, “I had already been in the presence of many spiritual masters. In Paris, I had known Gurdjieff; I had been to Zen monasteries in the Far East, practiced meditation in Burma and in Thailand, and I have visited several other masters in India.

When I met Gurdjieff in February 1943, I was twenty years old and I was exceptionally well received. You could say that Gurdjieff cured my tuberculosis because he ‘fed’ me both spiritually and over some extraordinary dinners, in the middle of the war, at a time when everything was scarce. What’s there to say about him? I thought of him as a formidable, yet dangerous power, whereas Svamiji always seemed to be good without any dark sides. I do feel very grateful towards Gurdjieff, because he welcomed me and because he was the first to make me see that higher states of consciousness could exist. He gave me my first tasting and this, in a way, roused my appetite. But even though it wasn’t a culture ‘fit’ as often is the case in the East, I did feel after several years that the road he took was not mine.

In Japan, I met So-en Roshi of the Ryutaku-ji monastery, as well as the Roshi of Nanzen-ji. Although I was very impressed by these two masters, one of whom spoke perfect English, I understood that to make real progress, I would have to stay in Japan for at least a couple of years, and this held me back. When I presented Svamiji with one of the Roshi of Nanzen-ji’s books, A flower does not talk, his reaction after reading it was: “Yes, that man has found the truth.”

In Burma, in a temple that was located in the suburbs of Rangoon, I practiced the Satipathana, and I visited Buddhist monasteries in the north of Thailand.

Meeting with Svamiji

When I visited India for the first time at the end of 1960, I had a couple of addresses in my pocket. Svami Prajnanpad is at the bottom of my list—I had an image of him like Vedanta’s ‘theologist.’ Once I got to Calcutta, my first visit is to a yogi in Puri who is said to be 125 years old. He is a massive man with atrophied legs from constantly sitting in the lotus position. Wristwatch in hand, I measure that his respiratory cycle lasts for two minutes. “Start by disciplining your food,” he tells me, but I am not yet ready to appreciate the relevancy of this advice and leave the next day. Next, I meet a Sikh master, then, in Bombay, Rajneesh, and finally Ma Ananda Mayee. Each time, my decision emerges rapidly—This is not the road for me—and I move on.

Then I meet a Sufi master in Kanpur, Bhai Sahib, with whom I stay for three weeks. I visit him every morning and every afternoon. Communication with the master, albeit in total silence, is exceptionally good, and I become familiar with extraordinary states of consciousness. Still, I can’t stay with him for longer than that. Before leaving France, I have imposed a couple of strict rules on myself that I have sworn to obey:

• to distrust anything that looks like a demand for money
• to leave for several days after a stay of three weeks at the most, no matter what happens, to avoid being brainwashed;
• to observe carefully the entourage and the goings-on amongst the disciples.

Bhai Sahib demands total obedience from his disciples. When, after three weeks, I announce to him that I will leave for a couple of days, the master is furious. He bursts out in violent maledictions and calls me names. I leave him anyway, but I can’t suppress the idea that he has cast an evil spell over my future.

It is because of this bad experience, however, that I meet Svamiji. When I go back from Kanpur to Calcutta by train, with the intention of going back to Thailand, I notice that my train makes a stop-over at Khana Junction, the station that is nearest to Svamiji’s ashram. I arrive there at five o’clock in the morning, leave all my luggage at the station—feeling certain that I will leave again soon—and walk over the rice-fields for two and a half hours before arriving at the ashram. Svami Prajnanpad is there alone, which is exceptional. The ashram is a marvelous enclave. I stay there for three weeks, then for another two. I have a sitting in the morning and one in the afternoon. It is the strongest experience I have ever had. For the first time in my life, I feel fulfilled.

What’s there to say about Svamiji that hasn’t already been said? I would like to put forward more specifically the personal and operational side of his teachings, for this made him truly unique amongst the masters that I have known. He himself certainly found it very important: he forced himself never to speak to more than one disciple at once, not even to a little group. I can only give you a sample of Svamiji’s teachings. I could tell you about how he made me grasp and realize “acceptance,” but this is very much linked to some personal experiences of mine, and I have no desire to expose my private life. I will therefore choose “seeing” which, for me, is linked to something objective that I can describe much more easily.

The Art of Seeing

It is one thing to say “One must see, simply see things the way they are, and not give oneself over to games of the mind …” It is not common to see what is there. Naturally, we “look” with our minds—with our interpretations, inferences, preconceptions, comparisons, expectations and through all our previous experience. To “see” is a function of a pure consciousness. It is an enchantment with what is that goes beyond “liking” or “disliking,” and enchantment precisely because it is like that (“that-ness,” Svamiji said)—and this has a taste of existential certainty: when I see, I am and I am with what I see … In Sanskrit, Rishi, the sage, is a seer—Paripasyanti, he who sees all around him. India has always celebrated the fact of seeing things directly as they are—not believing, imagining, speculating, but seeing. Still it is quite a different matter to be able to transmit this wisdom into personal and operational terms. This, in my opinion, has been the true greatness of Svamiji.

Perhaps a metaphor will clarify what I want to say. It’s like trying to split with an axe, an old tough tree trunk, knotty and with lots of curious difficulties. Svamiji was without equal when it came to discovering the right angle of attach, coming up with an adequate axe and inspiring his disciple with the will to use it, because in this case the disciple was both the trunk and the one who was to use the axe. In this manner, I must have had at least fifty sittings over the course of thirteen years, dense and intense, personal and operational, only to “see things as they are,” to learn the art and the discipline of seeing. These sittings transformed my life, and firstly, my professional life. This is how it happened.

When I came back to my job at Shell, where I was occupied with economic studies, I was asked to make market forecasts. I talked to Svamiji about it when I went to see him the following winter. After he’d asked me precisely what my work consisted of, he said: “That is your yoga. It will be the test that will allow you to verify whether you see things as they are. See, establish interrelations, see through and be one with it.”

By nature, I was not very predisposed to see. I would have been much more inclined to give myself over to interpretation and to mental constructions. Still, I launched myself into this activity with an enormous zeal, that I wouldn’t have had if I wouldn’t have been literally set afire by the taste, the sensation of “seeing.”

At the time, forecasting was essentially an econometric activity, that consisted of looking for “development laws” in the past course of a phenomenon and applying them to the future. This way, it was possible to make forecasts from behind one’s desk about elements with which one didn’t have any contact whatsoever. This way of doing it was almost the rule. Svamiji’s obligation for me to “see things” was revolutionary.

Instead of econometric calculations from global statistics, “seeing” demands, firstly, the identification of the forces at work and the chain(s) of cause and effect behind the development of a market, and secondly, information about the chain that is much finer than global statistics, a ladder where significant differences appear. “Seeing” certainly was a much more demanding and strenuous discipline than regular forecasting, but the managing directors who had to make use of forecasts quickly saw the difference and my field of activity expanded first to the entire Shell France and then, on an international level, to the ensemble of the Royal Dutch Shell group in London.

This was an exceptional opportunity: more than ever, the predictions would form a merciless test. I arrived in London a couple of years before the period of great turbulence that would shake the oil business: prices would rise enormously, the growth of consumption would be broken, concessions in the producing countries would be nationalized … and most of all, nobody in the industry was expecting any of this. I have described elsewhere some of the stages of this struggle to see things as they are, as opposed to the assumptions that one has of things. Every time I experienced difficulties, or had doubts about how to proceed, I went to ask Svamiji for advice. I would feel like a piece of wood floating on a river that gets stuck in the reed; Svamiji always found the way to release me.

Here’s how Michel Albert, former head of the French Plan, described the result of this approach: “I witnessed how, several years in advance, the economists at Shell were probably the only ones in the world who were able to foresee the oil crisis and convince their superiors to build their strategies from these views of the future.” Svamiji had made it very clear to me that it wasn’t only important to see, but also to make others see. Without this, scenarios, which went so much against the ruling expectations of the day, would be nothing but “water on a stone,” that would dissipate without leaving a single trace.

Obviously, Svamiji didn’t know much about oil, and he knew practically nothing about a company as big and as complex as Shell International. But because his teachings concern the optional functioning of a person in his entirety, and because of his ability to be present and focus entirely on the person who was with him, his advices could very well be applied to professional life. His spirituality was very much alive, and extended far beyond the partial aspect that I have described here.”

Pierre Wack

Preface

How This Book Came to Be

I never met Pierre Wack. It would be easy to argue that I have no business writing a book about him. As i...