The Art of the Plausible: Scenario Planning for China in a World Transformed by Conflict

Listen to my narration of the essay above.

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Back in the mid-2000s, when I was working as a tech journalist in Beijing, I was invited to join the Global Business Network. I was always struck by the incongruity between its name, which centers the word “business” in a way that makes it sound like a bunch of LinkedIn-prowling MBAs with outsize ambition, and what it actually was: an innovative, big-picture consultancy founded by folks like Peter Schwartz, Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame), Jay Ogilvy and Lawrence Wilkinson. GBN had by that point been acquired by the Monitor Group, but they kept their funky, book-stuffed Emeryville office, which gave off the same tech-savvy post-hippy vibe as the company’s founders: cerebral, polymathic public intellectuals, part pre-War Vienna, part Silicon Valley, fingers ever on the pulse of the global zeitgeist. 

To be sure, they did do business. With its roots in the pioneering strategy group at Royal Dutch/Shell, where Schwartz worked for several years, GBN’s stock in trade was scenario planning, an approach that the Rand Corporation had pioneered. They took on numerous Fortune 500 companies as clients and invited various configurations of people in the network — GBN called them “RPs,” for “remarkable people,” and some of them, like the musician Brian Eno, really were — to gather for one- or two-day sessions to develop and analyze scenarios relevant to their businesses on relatively long time horizons.