Companies run “What If” scenarios all the time. This does not, by itself, mean anything.
They rattle the gates to see whether something moves. Not necessarily because they know something, and certainly not because they have reached some secret conclusion, but because contemplating hypothetical futures has become part of the internal management ritual. Many of the people participating in these exercises probably could not explain, with any precision, what the exercise is actually supposed to accomplish.
It is simply overhead.
And the larger the company, the more of this overhead accumulates: programmes, workshops, scenarios, committees, consultations, glossy reports and strategic exercises whose principal achievement is often that somebody can demonstrate that the appropriate box has been ticked.
This does not make the companies evil. It makes them inefficient. It consumes time, energy, money and, perhaps most importantly, attention. Eventually, most of these “contemplating the IFs” exercises disappear into an archive, never to be opened again. They have served their administrative purpose. The brochure exists. The meeting happened. The presentation was delivered. Everyone can move on.
Until, perhaps, some activist discovers the document decades later.
Then the paper suddenly acquires a significance it never possessed when it was written.
This is where climate activists have a particular problem. Their narratives increasingly collide with reality, and when reality refuses to cooperate, the narrative requires distractions. Every corporate hypothetical becomes another potential fire to light: another document that can be presented as evidence of something that it was never evidence of.
This particular exercise could probably be extinguished almost immediately if large corporations responded as they should.
But they generally do not.
And the reason is not that some great corporate conspiracy is quietly preparing to implement an evil plan. The explanation is considerably less exciting and, in its own way, more depressing.
It is managerial spinelessness.
The typical manager does not want a fight. He wants to get through his contractual term without unnecessary trouble, collect his bonus and leave behind as little controversy as possible. Conflict is a career risk. Silence is not.
There is another problem. Managers frequently have very little institutional memory. They arrive after the decisions were made, after the previous controversies have disappeared into the archive, and after the people who understood why something was done have moved on. They see a document, not the history surrounding it.
So they do not fight.
They let activists construct whatever narrative they wish around an old scenario, a hypothetical, a risk assessment or an internal thought experiment. Correcting the record would require effort. It might require confrontation. It might attract attention. And there is almost never an immediate reward for doing it.
So the corporation remains silent.
The activist fills the silence.
And a management exercise that meant almost nothing at the time is eventually presented as though it were a declaration of intent.
That is how narratives acquire a life of their own: not necessarily because anyone designed them that way, but because the people who could have killed them at birth could not be bothered to do so.