Cross impact analysis

Cross-impact analysis is a methodology developed by Theodore Gordon and Olaf Helmer in 1966 to help determine how relationships between events would impact resulting events and reduce uncertainty in the future. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became interested in the methodology in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an analytic technique for predicting how different factors and variables would impact future decisions. In the mid-1970s, futurists began to use the methodology in larger numbers as a means to predict the probability of specific events and determine how related events impacted one another. By 2006, Cross Impact Analysis matured into a number of related methodologies with uses for businesses and communities as well as futurists and intelligence analysts.