EXIT: An alternative approach for structural cross-impact modeling and analysis

Cross-impact methods are planning, foresight and decision support tools often used in conjunction with the scenario technique. They enable systems modeling in a theory-driven way, grounded in expert judgment and understanding. This article presents the EXIT approach, a novel modeling technique and a computational method for structural cross-impact analysis. EXIT extracts insights from an expert-sourced cross-impact model, which describes the structure of direct interactions within a system. The EXIT transformation produces a relative quantification of the emergent, systemic relationships between model components, effectuating over the complex web of interactions in the system. Compared to the more established matrix multiplication approach, EXIT produces novel and more detailed analytical outputs on the basis of similar input, and offers new analytical possibilities in structural cross-impact analysis. A software implementing the EXIT transformation is freely available.