Compare methods

	Wild Card Analysis	Intuitive Logics Scenario Planning
Field	Futures Foresight Studies	Futures Foresight Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2009	1995
Originator	Futures studies surprise-analysis tradition (Millennium Project / Futures Research Methodology); foresight process framing by Joseph Voros	SRI International / Royal Dutch Shell tradition; Paul J. H. Schoemaker (codification)
Type	Surprise-assessment pipeline for low-probability, high-impact events	Deductive scenario-construction pipeline using two critical uncertainties
Seminal source	Glenn, J. C., & Gordon, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0. The Millennium Project. ISBN: 9780981894119	Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1995). Scenario planning: A tool for strategic thinking. Sloan Management Review, 36(2), 25-40.
Aliases	Wild Cards, Wildcard Analysis, High-Impact Low-Probability Event Analysis, Surprise Event Analysis	Intuitive Logics, 2x2 Scenario Matrix, Deductive Scenario Method, SRI Scenario Planning
Related	4	3
Summary	Wild card analysis is a futures method for confronting low-probability, high-impact surprise events — the abrupt discontinuities that conventional planning, anchored on expected trends, tends to ignore precisely because they are unlikely. The discipline of the method is to take such events seriously without succumbing to alarmism: to generate a deliberate set of plausible wild cards, assess each for its likelihood and the severity of its consequences, estimate how much warning the organization would have, and gauge its vulnerability. The payoff is not a prediction but robustness — strategies, capabilities, and contingency plans that hold up across a range of shocks rather than only in the expected future. As codified in the Millennium Project's Futures Research Methodology and located within Joseph Voros's generic foresight process, wild card analysis complements trend-based foresight by deliberately stress-testing the organization against the rare events that, by their very impact, can dominate its fate.	Intuitive logics is the most widely used family of scenario-planning methods, in which a small set of internally consistent, plausible stories about the future is constructed deductively from a few critical uncertainties. Rooted in the practice pioneered at SRI International and at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s, and codified for strategic thinking by Paul Schoemaker in his 1995 Sloan Management Review article, the approach asks a planning team to identify the driving forces shaping a focal decision, rank them by how much they matter and how uncertain they are, and select two critical uncertainties that become the orthogonal axes of a two-by-two matrix. The four quadrants define four contrasting but coherent futures, each developed into a narrative. The aim is not to predict but to stretch managers' mental models and to stress-test strategy against a manageable spread of qualitatively different worlds.