Throughout history people have tried to predict the future. The Ancient Romans divined their fate from the flight of birds. The Greeks consulted the oracle. Vikings read the runes. More recently, in the 1930s, the sci-fi author H. G. Wells, no slouch when it came to predicting events, called for a new academic post, a professor of foresight. And, in many ways, that is exactly what Nick Davis, a graduate of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, does for a living.

Davis is part of the scenario planning team at the World Economic Forum (WEF), a not-for-profit organisation based in Switzerland “committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas”. Scenario planning involves creating alternative stories about the future, helping people to contemplate unthinkable futures and plan for the unexpected.

“My role is to manage projects that create strategic and interesting conversations about issues likely to prove challenging in specific regions and industries in the immediate to long-term future,” he says. “We take strategists from companies, government officials, policymakers and academics and facilitate conversations to direct thinking towards the inherent uncertainties about the future.”

After a first degree in law from the University of Sydney, Davis was unlikely to have predicted his eventual career destination. He reached scenario planning by a route that included founding a small photography business and a stint as a solicitor in a commercial law firm, before heading to the UK in 2003.

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On his arrival in the UK, Davis joined Oxford Investment Research, a start-up, before embarking on an executive MBA at Saïd. “There were two main reasons for doing [it],” he says. “To get better at running the business and be more strategic in terms of building it, and to be able to add more value to clients by improving my knowledge of the international business issues relevant to foreign investment.”

Davis’s interest in scenario planning – his thesis subject – started at Saïd and the MBA has proved useful in many ways, he says. Not least in helping to secure one of 30 or so fellowships on WEF’s three-year global leadership programme, where he joined the scenario planning team.

“I’ve spent over a year looking at the future of the Gulf region in the Middle East, at the regional groupings, plus some detailed deep dive work on Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” he says.

He regularly draws on his MBA experience at work. “As part of my job I often have to talk to people about subjects that I’m not an expert on. For example, I might interview experts on the future of pensions in China. The MBA has helped to provide me with the vocabulary, and the exposure to concepts that makes the fast-track learning I need to do a lot easier.” So has he found his perfect career? “I feel like I have one of the best jobs, in a great organisation,” he says. Now that has to augur well for the future. Career high: “Being told that the Saudi Government wanted to incorporate scenarios I’d written into their national strategy.”

Career low: “An art director telling me that they used my photo on the cover of a national magazine in Australia only because they had no other choice.”

Childhood ambition: “At 12 I wrote an essay about living in Switzerland and chasing the heiress to a Swiss bank down the ski slopes. I almost got it right.”

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