The Hunt for Grey Swans — Top 15 Methods & Frameworks — #14 Critical Uncertainties

11 min readNov 9, 2024

Chasing Possibilities, Wild Cards and Extremes by Taking the Blue or Red Pill

Author: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” — Morpheus, The Matrix

The first words of our book Uncertainty: Making Sense of the World for Better, Bolder Outcomes makes no bones about it “uncertainiy makes the world go around and now there is more of it”. At some points dismissed as something that just happens to us, then something that we could sequester, then something we could algorithmically try to reduce to zero, Uncertainty is the biggest paralyzer and catalyst of our times, and more far more important than merely one letter of the managerial acronym VUCA.

We mention the red pill/blue pill dilemma (in the above quote) faced by Keanu Reeves’ character Thomas Anderson (or his hacker alias “Neo”) in the 1999 sci-fi action flick The Matrix. Neo meets his mentor to a different world “Morpheus” in some shadowy dystopic building, when he still has no idea what’s happening to him. Morpheus gives Neo the choice, ingest the red or blue pill, each with far reach in consequences. The blue pill will keep Neo in his own simulated reality, but his living narrative will have no basis in truth. The red pill will throw Neo headlong into the real world that is truth but Neo has no basis in understanding. Regardless, nothing after this decision will ever be the same. For knowledge (and our audience’s entertainment), Neo of course takes the red pill. Thus, we are sent down the rabbit hole to a strange new world where the usual physical laws don’t apply. The matrix is a place that denotes a transition from one world to the next.

The Matrix’ red pill/blue pill scenario is a powerful cinematic stand-in for Critical Uncertainties. Metaphorically, it conjures up the need to see different futures and possible realities. The analogy reminds us to get more resilient in being able to identify and act on disruption and complexity around us. And the cyberpunk fable compels us to find collaborators — who see the world with unfolding possibilities, relying on these unleashed minds for better counsel and preparation to act in a shared world. Usually when major shifts happen in a workplace, a marketplace, a society, or a culture — there are demarked level of decision respsonses with usually two significant choices — the foresight red pill/blue pill, and the two poles of a critical uncertainty.

Recent examples of this duality of scenarios that spur us to different actions:

The Workplace : will we return to office or stay hybrid over the next three years?
The World: will the Middle East turn into a large war or be snuffed out in 2025?
The Marketplace: will the soaring costs of staple products continue to skyrocket, or will a calming of prices ensue ovet the next ten years?
The Technology: will AI super intelligence continue unabated and replace humans, or will we be able to reign it in to augment but not kill us off ovber the next two decades?
The Culture: will cancel culture and taking people down rashly continue, or will reason and jurisprudence win out?
The Environment: will climate change happen too quickly over the next deacde for humans to address, or can we get ahead of it?

Although sometimes oversimplifying, often we are like Neo asked to choose between, and act on two different future worlds. Whether we enunciate them or not, critical uncertainties shape our culture, visions and plans. In my head, they invoke The Loving Spoonful’s lyrics

“Did you ever have to finally decide? Say yes to one and let the other one ride There’s so many changes, and tears you must hide. Did you ever have to finally decide?”

Not matter the source of uncertainty in our superCAFFEINATED world, effective and bold leadership need clear choices. So what’s it going to be the blue future? or red future? Choose wisely.

“Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.” — Henri Frederic Amiel

A reminder of the area our continuing Grey Swan series is covering:

Grey Swan Definition: Grey Swans are those unlikely but conceivable forces, capable of being thought about, prepared for, with impacts big enough to shake the world, for better or worse.

The Full Collection of Grey Swan Methods & Frameworks

Method #14: Critical Uncertainities

Our Critical Uncertainties tool is perhaps the simplest, and most fun framework we have in our arsenal. However, don’t confuse simple and fun, with less valuable. Our mission across all of the frameworks we are exposing is to get stakeholders to consider the imaginable, unimaginable and unthinkable. Critical Uncertainties puts it at the heart of its concept. Unlike trend discovery and extrapolation, which have a direction, uncertainties are unpredictable and can evolve in multiple ways.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” — Alan Watts

Invented by: Jay Ogilvy and Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network in the mid 1990s as part of their scenario planning efforts — an attempt to get leaders and staff to overcome the need to predict and embrace uncertainty, and also for these smae teams to become engrossed in the different Critical Uncertainty four plots that could then be swiftly communicated as evolving futures throughout the organization. In an era that exposed the impoitance of influence and storytelling, the product of their Critical Uncertanties scenario efforts could be more easily remembered and trigger action by decision-makers at all levels of management.

Category: Strategic planning and development, Scenario planning, Uncertainty analysis, Foresight narratives, Wicked challenges, Crisis response and adaptation, Grey Swan (extreme/wild card) scenarios, Publ;ic Policy development

Why we Love It as a Grey Swan Tool: Critical Uncertainties ensures organizations pinpoint and spend time with their most influential but unknown variables. The effort taps into our Grey Swan brains to overcome the limits of narrow forecasting, especially in complex challenges and systems like the trajectory of technologies, economies or climate.

Overcomes the sin of: Overconfidence bias — counteracts the overconfidence and swagger organizations have in any one mindset, algorithm or prediction about the future. Plus, the exercise itself makes the key participating stakeholders more malleable, adaptive and resilient for a set of different futures.

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” — William Arthur Ward

Critical Uncertainities Work Preceded By:

Define the Purpose and Scope
Clearly articulate the focal point of the analysis and its scope. Define what you aim to achieve, whether it’s for a strategic plan, product launch, or policy decision, as well as the timeframe and geographic area of focus. There can be wide latitude of: general and exploratory (e.g. how will the future of the global South evolve ove the next five years?) to specific and definitive (e.g. should be build a decentralized as our next big capyal investment?)
Assemble a Diverse Team
Bring together people from different backgrounds and areas of expertise. A diverse team ensures a wide range of perspectives, helping to uncover insights that may be overlooked by a more homogeneous group. Hopefully many are acquainted with a variety of intellectual disciplines, organziational functions and allow for people who challenge the orthodox.
Conduct a Comprehensive Environmental Scan
Gather data on trends, drivers of change, and external forces. This includes technological, economic, political, social, and environmental factors that could impact the focus area. The goal is to capture as complete a picture as possible.
Brainstorm Key Factors and Trends
From the environmental scan, identify the factors that are most likely to shape the future of the area in question. These can include certainties (e.g. demographic shifts or human behavioral long term trends) and variables with unknown outcomes (e.g. maianstream acceptance of AI tools in the workplace).
Distinguish Between Certainties and Uncertainties
Divide the identified factors into certainties (i.e. predictable elements) and uncertainties (i.e. unknowns that could vary widely). Certainties can set the background for scenarios, while uncertainties will shape the divergent paths.

The Heart of the Critical Uncertainties Work:

Identify Critical Uncertainties
Among the uncertainties, identify the ones that could have the largest impact for your organziation if they develop in different ways. These are the “critical uncertainties” that will shape the possible futures.
Prioritize Critical Uncertainties
Rank the critical uncertainties by their level of impact and unpredictability. This helps narrow down the list to the most influential factors that will drive distinct scenarios. Have an inventory of past bad decisions based on a flawed view of future uncertainties to combat resitance.
Select Two Key Uncertainty Axes
Choose two primary uncertainties that are both impactful and highly unpredictable, and set them as the X and Y axes of a scenario matrix. Tease out what the extremes of each might be. These two axes will form the basis for four potential scenarios.
Formulate Four Divergent Scenarios
Use the matrix created by the two uncertainty axes to develop four unique scenarios, each representing a different combination of the critical uncertainties. Label each one creativley with a catchy headline to remember its essence. Describe each scenario in detail, outlining the key characteristics and conditions that define it.
Develop Scenario Narratives
Create a narrative or story for each scenario to bring it to life. Describe what life, business, or the environment might look like under each scenario to make them relatable and easy to understand. Bring them to life through internet memes, newspaper headlines, Tik Tok short clips or visual collages. Some popular narrative arcs are: winners and losers, crisis and response, good news/bad news, revolution or evolution, tectonic change, cycles, david vs. Goliath
What, So What, Now What — Analyze the Implications for Each Scenario
Identify the opportunities, risks, and challenges associated with each scenario. Consider how the organization or project would fare in each situation and what strategic moves could enhance resilience and adaptability.

Critical Uncertainties work followed by:

Identify Strategic Responses and Contingency Plans
Develop robust and hedging strategies across multiple scenarios, focusing on flexibility and adaptability. Create contingency plans to prepare for each scenario’s potential impact on the organization or project. Do not dismiss ones that may seem remote by your current environment.
Monitor, Review, and Update Regularly
Establish a process for regularly monitoring the critical uncertainties and assessing how they’re unfolding. Periodic updates ensure the analysis remains relevant and can guide ongoing strategic adjustments.

Given the recent American election that saw Trump’s Republican party beat Harris’ Democrats, we provide four scenarios below based on critical uncertainties that might inform a public policy planner or exporting company a framework for discussing futures:

Additional Commentary on Critical Uncertainties:

“Many narrative-based futures tools are high on imagination, low on tangibility — Critical Uncertainties does not suffer from this compromise. In my estimation, it is the best divergent framework exercise to uncover Grey Swans wild cards because the scenario stories are grounded and driven by a two-by-two stark, contrasting estimations of the future. In a workplace of massive distraction and attention wane, the use of Critical Uncertainties has the ability to cut through corporate sleepwalking and create forums for real imaginative and important thinking about the poles of our future, which is where most innovations comes from anyway.” — Sean Moffitt

Grey Swans — A Series of Specialty Posts:

This is number fourteeen of a set of fifteen posts on different methods and frameworks for chasing Grey Swans. but we have so much other commentary on this valuable but often overlooked chase for the non-obvious:

I — Grey Swan Week and defining Grey Swans
II — Our 2023 Report Card of Grey Swans (last year’s review and performance)
III — Fifteen Ways to Hunt for Grey Swans (methods and frameworks) — #1 CIPHER,
#2 SCAMPER
#3 SUPERCAFFEINATED U
#4 FUTURES WHEEL
#5 CONE OF POSSIBILITIES
#6 WEAK SIGNALS
#7 SWAN SOURCING
#8 SCENARIO ARCHETYPES
#9 OUTSIDE-IN COLLISIONS
#10 POSSIBILITY PREMORTEMS
#11 RED TEAMING
#12 WHAT IF … EXPLORATION
#13 ADOR EDGES
#14 CRITICAL UNCERTAINTIES
#15 MULTI-VIEW SCENARIOS
IV — Fifty Grey Swan Wild Card Influences in 2025 (ranking the categories)
V — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<25%) — Cloudy Swans
VI — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<5%) — Stormy Swans
VII — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<1%) — Shadow Swans

Stay tuned with us here, as well as on our website for all the rundowns.

Participate in our Hunt for Grey Swans

Don’t worry it’s a humane hunt. We have already invited some of our regular contributors to provide us the seeds of what will be our authoritative list of one hundred 2024 Grey Swans.

These are the improbable, disruptive and remote developments that decision makers better keep at least one eye peeled open for so they don’t blindside them. Perhaps you have some you’ve considered yourself.

Be among the most talented and wide-eyed observers. Let us know your Grey Swan additions and we will add them to our annual collection with our 2024 Grey Swan Guild Submission Form. Other benefits and collabroations may follow.

Grey Swan Submission Form: https://bit.ly/2024greyswan

Grey Swan Guild — Making Sense of the World and Next Grey Swans

We are the Guild whose mission it is to make sense of the world and next Grey Swans (wild cards, scenarios, early signals).

How we do this is guided by our four values of: aspiration, collaboration, curiosity and purpose.

We bring this to life through four facets of our world-leading Guild experience:

Intelligence, Content and Publications
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Here’s what you can do in the Guild:

Learn about the Guild: https://www.greyswanguild.org/
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Now past our 4th year of our Guild, we have built twelve ventures designed to create value and tap our enormous reservoir of talent found inside the Guild.

To get directly involved in any one of our Cygnus Ventures , including two venture efforts focused on research and intelligence efforts called Weathervanes (current focused) and The Radar Collection (future-focused).

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To get directly involved in any one of our twelve (12) Cygnus Ventures including click here. To hire our ventures group for any of your own wicked challenges or Grey Swans, let’s have a discussion.