Storying corporate futures:

The Shell Scenarios

An Interview with Betty Sue Flowers
This chapter appeared in Corporate Futures, Volume V of the Late Editions Series, George Marcus ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Introduction

This chapter contains two interviews that I conducted with Betty Sue Flowers about her writing and editing of Shell International’s 1992 and 1995 futures-planning scenarios. I first met Betty Sue at a men’s
conference (a la Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement) in Austin, Texas, where she and I were two of only four women speakers, and the only two present the night we met. It took me a while to spot her in a huge ballroom filled with 800 men and two women–she sat on the back row wearing a businesslike gray dress with black buttons, and
as a result (in spite of her shoulder-length blonde hair) was nearly invisible–by choice, I later found out. Standing out is not her style.