A Philosophical Perspective on Scenarios, Realizations and their Definitions – What Should Managers do With That?

The current approach on how scenarios and realizations are dealt with will be first shown. Then we will show that they have limitations and that these definitions are relevant from the geosciences standpoint but become irrelevant from a petroleum project perspective. This pushes towards linking the two and globalizing the uncertainty approach by taking into account the downstream (in the petroleum project sense) impact of a given uncertainty. In addition, there is an ambivalent requirement from management towards their technical teams on how uncertainties should be managed. Once the problems have been posed, some thoughts will be proposed towards changing mindsets on how uncertainties should be dealt with and what managers should do with them.