Trend Impact Analysis
Trend impact analysis (TIA) is a forecasting method that marries quantitative extrapolation with expert judgment about disruptive future events. Developed by Theodore Gordon and colleagues at The Futures Group in the early 1970s and later codified in the Millennium Project's Futures Research Methodology, it starts from a 'surprise-free' baseline produced by fitting and projecting a historical time series. It then asks which unprecedented events — events with no historical analog that ordinary extrapolation cannot anticipate — could deflect that trend, and with what probability, magnitude, and timing. Through Monte Carlo simulation those probabilistic impacts perturb the baseline, yielding not a single line but a probability envelope that shows how the trend might bend if the unexpected occurs.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Gordon, T. J., & Hayward, H. (1968). Initial experiments with the cross-impact matrix method of forecasting. Futures, 1(2), 100-116. · DOI 10.1016/S0016-3287(68)80003-5
- Glenn, J. C., & Gordon, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0. The Millennium Project. · ISBN 9780981894119
Curated claims
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Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.