Sub-Total: $0.00
Why H.G. Wells Would Be Great in Your Next Workshop
The War of the Worlds is surprisingly relevant to scenario planning and not just because it involves aliens, chaos, and people in London doing the early-1900s version of “doomscrolling.”
Its significance runs deep. Here are the core ways it matters (and why many scenario planners quietly love this story):
It’s the original “unthinkable scenario”
H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1898, when the dominant belief was that the British Empire was invincible. Wells flipped the script with a scenario that felt absurd, until you actually walked through its logic. Takeaway for scenario planning: It showed that implausible doesn’t mean impossible. Sometimes the most useful scenario is the one people initially roll their eyes at.
It forces readers to inhabit disruption, not just observe it
Wells wrote the book like a journalistic, day-by-day eyewitness account. You feel the confusion, misinformation, and cascading failures. This is scenario planning gold. Scenarios aren’t just about what happens; they’re about how people react, how systems fail, and how institutions adapt (or don’t). Wells basically pioneered immersive future-narrative design.
It challenges assumptions about technological superiority
The British Empire had cutting-edge tech, global reach, and a powerful military. Then the Martians showed up with heat rays and war machines that made everything obsolete. This is straight out of every modern strategic foresight workshop:
- What if a new actor uses a capability we’ve never seen before?
- What if our comparative advantages disappear overnight?
- What if asymmetric disruption beats legacy strength?
Wells is doing red-teaming 60 years before RAND started planning in the mid-20th Century.
It’s a masterclass in cascading systems failure
In the story, one local shock (Martian landing) triggers:
- Transportation collapse
- Communication breakdown
- Mass displacement
- Resource scarcity
- Panic behavior
- Government paralysis
If Wells were alive today, he’d be keynote speaker for your resilience conference.
It models humility as a strategic asset
Ultimately, the greatest power on Earth isn’t military might or infrastructure. It’s a humbling dependency on biology and chance (spoiler: the Martians die from bacteria).
This reinforces a core scenario-planning truth:
No system, however strong, fully understands its vulnerabilities.
It’s a poetic reminder not to anchor planning on confidence but on curiosity.
The 1938 radio broadcast is a case study in information ecosystems
Orson Welles’ broadcast famously caused pockets of real-world panic. This event matters because it shows:
- People respond to narratives more than data
- Misinformation amplifies shock events
- Situational awareness collapses under emotional stress
- Systems aren’t just physical, they’re informational
It’s one of the best historical examples of how scenarios can drive real behavior.
The 1953 film turns the scenario into a Cold War stress test
The first major Hollywood adaptation pushed The War of the Worlds into a new era of strategic anxiety. Released in 1953, the film reframed Wells’ original “unthinkable scenario” through the lens of nuclear fear, airpower vulnerability, and early civil-defense thinking.
For scenario planners, it’s a perfect example of how the same core narrative can be reinterpreted to explore new risks:
- How do societies respond when their most advanced weapons fail?
- How do civilian populations behave under sudden technological shock?
- What happens when existential threats bypass traditional deterrence?
The film functioned as a cultural tabletop exercise by testing the limits of military readiness, public communication, and Cold War-era assumptions about American technological superiority.
It demonstrates the power of storytelling in stress-testing
Scenario planners often forget this, but Wells proved it: A scenario is only as effective as the story people are willing to emotionally simulate. The longevity of The War of the Worlds with its films, radio dramas, and remakes proves the durability of a well-framed future stress test. It has a “narrative stickiness” factor.
It’s an early precursor to futures thinking
Wells went on to write essays on:
- The future of warfare
- Technological forecasts
- Geopolitics
- Population growth
- Planetary governance
Modern futurists often cite him as one of the originators of structured speculative thinking. The War of the Worlds was one of his first large-scale “what if” exercises.
In short: The War of the Worlds is significant to scenario planning because it is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of using narrative fiction to explore systemic shock, challenge assumptions, and force audiences to reconsider unexamined vulnerabilities. It’s not about aliens; it’s about perspective.
It teaches us:
- How fragile systems can be
- How fast assumptions can fail
- How powerful imagination is as a planning tool.
If Wells were alive today, he’d absolutely be in your scenario workshop, probably rolling his eyes at our lack of heat rays, but otherwise fitting right in.
Want to try this mindset yourself?
A simple way to put these lessons into practice is through a quick, self-guided exercise I call “The Martian Shock Tabletop,” a lightweight scenario drill that uses Wells’ core idea to help organizations rehearse the unknown.
Pick any part of your organization (operations, communication, technology, logistics) and ask:
- What happens if something utterly unprecedented arrives overnight?
- What assumptions break first?
- What systems cascade into failure?
- What adaptive behaviors emerge under pressure?
- Where are the hidden strengths and vulnerabilities?
It’s fast, fun, and surprisingly revealing. Because preparing for Martians isn’t really about Martians. It’s about thinking bolder, looking wider, and building the kind of resilience that thrives when the future refuses to behave.