The Shell Game: How Strategic Roleplaying Became Corporate America's Secret Weapon

In the early 1970s, a small group of Shell planners led by French oil executive Pierre Wack, were developing something unprecedented in corporate strategy.

They weren't trying to predict the future—they were creating multiple stories about how the future might unfold.

Inside Shell's London headquarters, Wack and his team crafted detailed scenarios where Arab nations might use oil as a political weapon, where prices could skyrocket dramatically, where the very foundation of the global economy might shift.

Instead of traditional forecasting, Wack believed in changing how executives thought about uncertainty.

His team developed what they called "scenario planning"—not predictions, but alternative stories designed to challenge assumptions and expand mental models.

And as it turned out, this approach would prove extraordinarily prescient.

What Shell discovered through their scenario planning was something profound about strategic thinking: there is extraordinary power in systematically imagining alternative futures. When you develop detailed, plausible stories about how the world might change—and then seriously consider what you would do in each scenario—you don't just understand possibilities intellectually. You prepare for them emotionally and strategically.

This is the counterintuitive insight that separates truly strategic organizations from merely analytical ones. Analysis can tell you what happened. Scenario planning can help you prepare for what might happen next.

Shell's scenario planners understood this distinction. They weren't only interested in creating elaborate forecasts or statistical models.

They wanted their executives to inhabit possible futures, to work through what it would feel like to make decisions under radically different conditions. It was strategic storytelling for corporate planning.

By 1973, Shell's scenario planning had evolved into something unprecedented in corporate history. They had developed detailed narratives about how the world might change.

One scenario envisioned a world where oil-producing nations would use oil as a political weapon, dramatically raising prices and creating global economic chaos.

Shell executives were asked to consider this imagined world and think through their strategic responses.

What investments would they make? What partnerships would they pursue? How would they position Shell to not just survive, but thrive?

When the Arab oil embargo hit in October 1973, sending oil prices from $3 to $12 per barrel seemingly overnight, something remarkable happened.

While Shell's competitors scrambled to understand this new reality, Shell's executives experienced something closer to recognition than surprise. They hadn't predicted this exact crisis, but they had systematically thought through similar scenarios and considered their responses.

The result was dramatically better performance during the crisis. Shell had positioned itself strategically for a world of expensive oil, volatile markets, and geopolitical uncertainty. They had made key decisions—like specializing in light fuels that were harder to replace and upgrading refinery capacity—that proved crucial when the crisis hit.

The Simulation Advantage

What Shell discovered—and what leading organizations across industries are rediscovering today—is that the highest form of strategic thinking isn't analysis at all. It's simulation.

Not just computer simulation, but human simulation.

Not just running algorithms, but running scenarios where real people make real decisions under imagined conditions.

This insight challenges everything we've been taught about business strategy. We're told to gather data, analyze trends, build models, make predictions.

But Shell's experience suggests something radically different: the future belongs to organizations that can roleplay it into existence.

Most strategic planning begins with the assumption that we can predict the future by understanding the past.

Shell's approach began with the assumption that we can prepare for the future by inhabiting multiple possible versions of it.

The difference is profound. Prediction is passive; simulation is active.

Prediction asks, "What will happen?"

Simulation asks, "What would we do if this happened?"

Prediction seeks to reduce uncertainty; simulation seeks to build comfort with uncertainty.

The Roleplayer's Advantage

But here's where the story gets really interesting. Shell's scenario planning worked not because they guessed right about the oil crisis—plenty of experts had predicted something similar.

It worked because they had trained their executives to think and feel like players in a complex game rather than analysts of a static system.

When you roleplay, something neurologically fascinating happens. Your brain doesn't distinguish between simulated experience and real experience as clearly as you might think. The emotions feel real. The pressure feels real. The decision-making patterns become real. You're not just thinking about what someone else might do; you're actually becoming someone else, temporarily but meaningfully.

Shell understood that business strategy needed the same kind of full-body learning.

Reading about geopolitical instability is one thing; actually playing the role of a Saudi oil minister facing pressure from his population while negotiating with American oil executives is something else entirely.

The Democratization of Strategic Gaming

What makes this story particularly relevant today is that the tools Shell pioneered have become accessible to organizations of every size. You don't need a team of PhDs or a massive budget to begin incorporating strategic roleplaying into your planning process.

Consider what this might look like in your industry.

If you run a restaurant, what would happen if you roleplayed being your suppliers during a supply chain crisis? If you lead a tech startup, what insights might emerge from literally acting out your customers' frustrations with your product? If you manage a retail business, what would you discover by pretending to be your competitors facing your latest innovation?

The power isn't in the accuracy of your roleplaying—it's in the experiential learning that comes from inhabiting different perspectives. When you stop analyzing other people's motivations and start feeling them, your strategic thinking transforms from abstract to visceral, from theoretical to practical, from clever to wise.

The Future Belongs to Roleplayers

Shell's story reveals something profound about how high-stakes decisions get made in an uncertain world. The organizations that thrive aren't necessarily the ones with the best data or the smartest analysts. They're the ones whose leaders have practiced making decisions under pressure, who have felt what it's like to navigate complexity, who have trained their intuition through systematic imagination.

This is the secret weapon hiding in plain sight in today's business world, and it belongs to those organizations brave enough to "play pretend".

The next time you're facing a major strategic decision, resist the urge to dive immediately into analysis. Instead, gather your team and ask a different question: "What if we weren't ourselves? What if we were our customers, our competitors, our suppliers, facing this same situation? What would we do then?"

In a world where change is the only constant, the future belongs not to the best predictors, but to the best players.