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It's heady stuff when captains of industry and world leaders — even movie directors — buy into your visions of the future. But for Peter Schwartz, it's all in a day's work. Remember the talking ads, animated cereal box and self-updating newspaper in Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report, set in 2054? All from Schwartz. Meanwhile, his consulting firm, Global Business Network (GBN), based in Emeryville, Calif., plots out future scenarios — such as whether another SARS outbreak could affect Singapore Airlines — to help businesses plan for the unthinkable. "Somewhere in each scenario exercise — if we've done our homework — is the future," says Schwartz, 58. "Very rarely have we really missed. More often our failure is in getting people to take it seriously."

That was particularly true before 9/11. The year before, as part of a study for a Senate commission, Schwartz had brought up the horrifying possibility of terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center. That wasn't the first of his scenarios to come true. In the 1970s, he and his mentors at Shell warned of the rise of OPEC and the oil crisis, and as the cold war raged in the 1980s, he foresaw the downfall of the Soviet Union and the rise of an obscure apparatchik named Mikhail Gorbachev.

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But Schwartz flinches when you call any of them predictions, since each scenario is only one of a set. The Greening of Russia scenario that foresaw the rise of Gorbachev, for example, was balanced against the New Stalinism, which imagined a hard-line Soviet backlash. "If you try to predict something," says Schwartz, "you end up with very conventional ideas. Scenarios help you anticipate surprises."

Sometimes scenarios can presage those surprises more than a decade ahead of time. In his seminal book The Art of the Long View (1991)--now part of the curriculum at many management schools — Schwartz outlined three post — cold war scenarios for the year 2005. New Empires saw the rise of multiple warring trading blocs. Market World imagined the spread of capitalism creating a peaceful "global commons." But the most prescient vision was Change Without Progress — a world plagued by ethnic revolution, "global gang wars," corporate raiders, hackers and "portable radio-connected telephones."

So it's little wonder so many listen when Schwartz speaks. GBN, which was sold in 2000 to the Monitor Group, based in Cambridge, Mass., for a seven-figure sum, has seen a 25% rise in requests for scenarios this year alone. Schwartz won't say who he's currently working with but says he has been asked to come up with several scenarios for a second George W. Bush Administration. If Bush prevails, Schwartz says, the President may become more internationalist and environmentalist. "Even the auto industry is greener than this Administration," he says.

Schwartz, of course, has been wrong — spectacularly, embarrassingly so. On Aug. 1, 1990, he had dinner with a Chicago CEO and client who asked whether reports of the Iraqi army massing on the border with Kuwait were anything to worry about. "Don't think twice about it," replied Schwartz, who had worked long enough in the oil industry for Shell to be familiar with Iraqi saber rattling. The next day Kuwait was invaded, and Schwartz "looked like an idiot," he concedes. "I applied an old mental map to a new situation and failed to force myself to be imaginative."

GBN's most egregious failure came out of a round-table discussion that it convened in Mexico in 1994 at which the experts all waxed optimistic about the country's future. The three scenarios they devised were Good, Better and Best. None saw the financial crisis and collapse of the peso that hit three weeks later. Again, Schwartz had failed to follow his own rule: always challenge conventional wisdom.

Which is not his problem these days. Contrary to politicians on both sides of the blue-red divide, Schwartz says no amount of spending on homeland security will stop another terrorist attack. His best-case scenario is that we'll be smarter about limiting the spillover damage to the economy. That, at least, is something.

• Chris Taylor