Introduction 3

cannot claim to explain the past and deny that she or he has anything
to say about the future. As Milton Friedman insisted in his Essays in
Positive Economics (1953), the chief test of a scientic theory is its ability
to predict.
Even so, predicting the future is decidedly more dicult than ex-
plaining the past. Change results from a mixture of general and specic
factors. One could predict some important features of Britain's indus-
trial revolution from the ready availability of coal, the depletion of
forests, the accumulation of capital through foreign trade, and so on. But
the explanation would be incomplete without including Watt's specic
invention of the steam engine. Even if we could not fully explain that
invention, we should want to include it in our overall historical predic-
tion of what followed.
But when we turn to the future we cannot know the specic new
knowledge that will be discovered (though for a decade or so ahead we
may have some good general ideas). This removes one important prop
from our ability to think about change.
A similar problem relates to political events. The history of Europe
was transformed by a Corsican ocer who happened to be stationed in
Paris in 1795. No one forecasting in 1790 could have predicted Bona-
parte's future role, but when we look back it was decisive. Similarly with
respect to Adolph Hitler in 1923, or the discovery in 1948 of the semi-
conducting properties of silicon and related substances. Looking ahead,
our uncertainty about these specic features means that it is much easier
to forecast general social and technological trends than it is to forecast
specic political or technical events.
All predictions are of course uncertain since we could never know
all the factors at work nor the exact process through which they have
their eects. This is obviously true of the future, but it is equally true of
the past. When a historian tells you that X caused Y, he cannot possibly
mean that from knowing X you would have been certain that Y would
follow. All predisposing circumstances give rise to a range of possible
outcomes. That is how forecasts should be expressed.
Some planners go further and shun the word forecasting altogether.
According to them the future is so dicult to descry that we can only
oer various scenarios of what might happen. This process of scenario
building was developed at Shell by Pierre Wack and his successor Peter
Schwartz. It can serve a crucial function in forcing decision makers to