This article originally appeared in the Journal of Petroleum Technology (subscription required).

Imagine if you could have seen North America’s shale gas phenomenon coming, years ahead of the competition. What would you have done differently?

Some companies might have avoided spending billions of dollars on liquefied natural gas import facilities in the United States. Some might have acquired acreage before hyperinflation escalated land values. Others would have reallocated capital to better position their companies for the onslaught of natural gas and natural gas liquids. If you had seen it coming, would you have anticipated the global competitive advantage of US domestic industries, from manufacturing to fertilizer to plastics to coal, and the resulting changes to international flows?

Hindsight is 20/20, but there were indicators pointing to a shale gas supply shock. What was missing for most executive teams was a systematic approach for identifying plausible scenarios and defining the leading indicators that would allow them to monitor the market’s evolution toward them.

Read the full article in the Journal of Petroleum Technology (subscription required).

Mark Gottfredson is a director of Bain & Company’s office in Dallas and a leader in the firm’s performance improvement practice. His experience covers a wide variety of upstream and downstream oil and gas businesses, with specialization in marketing and complexity reduction. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker scholar, and a BA in Japanese from Brigham Young University.