From transient shocks to unexpected outcomes: disruptive drivers in scenario pathways

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Cross-Impact Balance method to better analyze diverse scenario pathways, stress-test outcomes, and explore rare futures in complex socio-technical systems.

Contribution

It formalizes and implements new run types in CIB to account for shocks, regime extremes, structural uncertainty, and exogenous influences.

Findings

Extended CIB supports stress-testing of pathways.

Enables comparison across different regimes and assumptions.

Helps identify outcomes stable across uncertainties.

Abstract

Scenario pathways (e.g. for the energy transition) often use a single trajectory or a band. That is not sufficient when one needs to understand why outcomes differ and under what stress or uncertainty they arise. Doing so requires tracking disequilibrium along pathways, comparing runs across "worlds" or storylines, and surfacing outcomes that are unlikely under a central view but plausible when how factors interact is uncertain. Cross-Impact Balance (CIB) is a well-established method for generating pathways. This paper extends CIB to formalise and implement these dimensions in pathway runs, and defines four run types that respectively emphasise one-off shocks, extremes under alternative regimes, influence-structure uncertainty that widens over time, and exogenous shocks as a baseline for comparison. The approach is applied to a socio-technical decarbonisation pathway for illustration. Together, the extensions support stress-testing, comparison across storyline or regime assumptions, and exploration of rare or surprising futures, and help analysts distinguish results that are stable across those assumptions from those that depend on structural uncertainty about the influence table.