Author(s): Richard Daglish

Biography

Napier Collyns was at the heart of the small group of planners and forecasters at Shell (which included Pierre Wack, Herman Kahn, and Peter Schwartz) who invented and pioneered scenario planning. Later he was a founding member of International Futures Forum, and he was part of the small group who founded the massively influential Global Business Network (GBN). He also worked for much of his later professional life in and out of the limelight helping to get a surprising number of highly influential books written and published on both sides of the Atlantic.

This memoir of the life of Napier Collyns is the biography of the emergence of a new way of thinking about the future, an idea which has had a profound effect on the way organisations understand themselves as engines of continuous adaptation, and the way in which leadership approaches the management of risk and resilience over the long term.