A confidence-building encyclopedia of scenario projects done to date, in the US, Europe, and South Africa. Ordinarily, there's nothing so tedious as reading about someone else's scenarios, and the casual reader must invest a fair amount of reading between the lines to get value from this book. But Ms. Ringland's descriptions are cheerfully engaging, and they show how a variety of corporations and nonprofit organizations have used the method. I particularly appreciated the overview of the economists' scenarios on the future of European Monetary Union, which arguably helped influence the rapid acceptance of the Euro, and Shell's 1996 scenarios, in which the company's planners admit that, even in a global boom and oil glut, demand for oil will peak as energy technologies come on line.
