“By shifting the focus from whether an event could occur to how it may happen, analysts allow themselves to suspend judgment about the likelihood of the event and focus more on what developments—even unlikely ones—might enable such an outcome.”US Government · A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis · 2009 · «A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis» (US Government, martie 2009), secțiunea «What If? Analysis» — «Value Added», p. 24
You do not debate whether it will happen; you write how it would happen and what you would see first.
These are two related contrarian techniques for the moment when everyone is sure something will not happen. High-Impact/Low-Probability (HILP) analysis asks: if it does happen, what are the consequences, and by what path would we get there? What If? analysis accepts from the outset that the event has occurred and moves straight to how it came about. The primer recalls events once considered unlikely — the fall of the Shah, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany — and a State Department assessment of 27 November 1941 that gave odds of five to one against the United States and Japan being at war by 15 December. The steps: state the dominant analytic line and the high-impact outcome clearly; assume it has happened; choose plausible triggers, such as the death of a leader, a natural disaster or an economic shock; think backwards, step by step, about what must have occurred; identify one or more pathways; write observable indicators for each and monitor them periodically. It matters most when a judgement rests on limited information or unproven assumptions. The trap: the exercise does not change the probability; it produces signposts to watch and hedging options. Taken out of context, it turns into alarmism.
The card shows the techniques and steps. The next step is subtler: asking how something could happen frees the mind differently than asking whether it will. When you judge probability, you look for reasons to dismiss the scenario. When you assume it happened, you look for reasons that make it possible. Think of a friend who says he will never leave town: don't ask whether he intends to, ask what could take him away — a job, a breakup, illness in the family. Each answer becomes a signal you can spot from afar. That's why the exercise works for small decisions too, not just for intelligence services. The next question is how to pick the triggers worth watching.
Choosing triggers is what makes the exercise serious rather than a game of imagination. A good trigger sits in the middle: neither absurd nor certain. A leader's death, an earthquake, a money crisis — all things that have happened before. Pick something impossible, and the signals become useless. Think of an elderly neighbor living alone: a fall in the bathroom is a plausible trigger; a meteorite on the house is not. For each trigger you choose, you reason backward through the steps that must have happened before the event. On that path, the indicators you can actually watch appear. But finding indicators is half the job; what you do with them afterward is another story.
Why it matters Low probability is exactly why nobody prepares the warning signposts; when the event arrives, there is no list that could have announced it.