Patrick Marren is a principal of The Futures Strategy Group, a consultancy devoted to helping clients deal with irreducible uncertainty. He is the author of Fatal Certainty: How a Cult of Prediction Made the Twenty-First Century Into an Era of Strategic Shock – and How Rigorous Imagination Could Bring Us Back.
He has been engaged in scenario planning and other approaches to organizational planning under conditions of future uncertainty for thirty years, with The Futures Strategy Group and its predecessor organizations, Deloitte Consulting and The Futures Group. He has led or participated in strategic planning engagements for numerous leading private-sector organizations, such as Pfizer, IBM, Ford, United Airlines, the Options Clearing Corporation, several consumer product companies, banks. He has worked for some fifteen different agencies of the United States Federal Government, including the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Homeland Security, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture, as well as NASA, the Joint Planning & Development Office for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, FEMA, the FAA, CDC, the intelligence community, the Panama Canal Commission, and the United States Coast Guard. He has done similar work for a number of nonprofit and public-private institutions, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, the American Board of Family Medicine, and several other medical boards. Mr. Marren has an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now the Booth School of Business), and an AB, cum laude general studies, in Government, from Harvard University.