Compare methods

	SMIC Prob-Expert	La Prospective Morphological Scenarios
Field	Futures Foresight Studies	Futures Foresight Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2006	2006
Originator	Michel Godet (LIPSOR)	Michel Godet (LIPSOR, Conservatoire national des arts et metiers)
Type	Probabilistic cross-impact pipeline for ranking scenario combinations	Combinatorial scenario-construction pipeline within La Prospective
Seminal source	Godet, M. (2006). Creating Futures: Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool (2nd ed.). Economica. ISBN: 9782717852448	Godet, M. (2006). Creating Futures: Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool (2nd ed.). Economica. ISBN: 9782717852448
Aliases	SMIC, Systeme et Matrices d'Impacts Croises, SMIC-PROB-EXPERT, Probabilistic Cross-Impact Method	Godet Morphological Scenarios, Prospective Scenario Building, French School Scenario Method, Morphologie des scenarios
Related	3	4
Summary	SMIC Prob-Expert — from the French Systeme et Matrices d'Impacts Croises, Systems and Matrices of Cross-Impacts — is the probabilistic cross-impact method in Michel Godet's la prospective toolkit. It takes a small set of fundamental hypotheses about the future and asks experts for both the simple probability that each hypothesis comes true and the conditional probabilities linking the hypotheses to one another. Because experts' raw estimates are rarely mutually consistent, SMIC's core is a quadratic optimisation that adjusts them minimally into a coherent joint probability distribution over the 2^n possible combinations of the hypotheses. Each combination is an image of the future — a scenario — and the corrected, or net, probabilities rank these images from most to least likely. The method thereby turns scattered expert opinion into a probabilistically weighted set of scenarios, identifying the few core futures that concentrate most of the probability mass.	Within the French school of la prospective developed by Michel Godet, morphological scenario construction is the integrating stage that turns the outputs of structural and actor analysis into a small set of coherent images of the future. Building on Fritz Zwicky's morphological method, Godet decomposes the studied system into a set of dimensions or components, attaches to each a few mutually exclusive hypotheses about how it might evolve, and treats the Cartesian product of these hypotheses as the morphological space of all conceivable futures. Because that space is combinatorially large, the method's analytical work lies in reducing it: pruning combinations that are internally incoherent, implausible, or incompatible with the strategies of key actors, until a handful of contrasted, self-consistent scenarios remain. Distinct from general morphological analysis, this is the scenario-building application that consumes the variables identified by MICMAC and the actor positions mapped by MACTOR.