Geopolitical Forecasting
The shape of
what might happen.
SIGMA Futures Group makes structured, probabilistic assessments of geopolitical conflict, escalation, and systemic risk — explicit odds, set down before events and checked against the outcome.
sigma /ˈsɪɡmə/ · noun
- statistics. the standard deviation — a measure of how far outcomes spread from the expected; the shape of uncertainty itself.
- Greek. the eighteenth letter (Σ, σ); in mathematics, the summation — many parts gathered into one.
- SIGMA. the discipline of taking the measure of what might happen before it does — and seeing volatility clearly enough to move through it well.
Mission
Foresight in service of the long horizon.
Most risk analysis is built for the next quarter. SIGMA is built for the longer horizon. We take seriously that the world has entered a period of systemic transition — geopolitical, economic, ecological, technological — in which old base rates are loosening and the risks that matter most are those that compound quietly and arrive together.
Reading that clearly is not about profiting from disorder. It is about helping capital and institutions move through volatility without being broken by it — and, where the choice exists, steering toward the more durable arrangements a long transition rewards.
A situation rarely resolves to a single outcome, but to a field of them, each with its weight — which is the plural in Futures. The work is to read that field early, and to keep the ones worth having within reach.
Clear sight in the present, in service of resilience over time.
Approach
Rigour you can interrogate — even when the record stays private.
Most geopolitical commentary is unfalsifiable: fluent, plausible, and impossible to grade. SIGMA works differently. Every assessment commits to explicit probabilities over defined scenarios, states what would change them, and is scored against outcomes once events resolve.
01 — Probabilities and horizons
How likely, by when, against what
Every assessment gives an outcome an explicit probability, a horizon, and the alternatives it is weighed against. Uncertainty is stated as a magnitude.
02 — Made in advance
Dated, fixed, on the record
Assessments are timestamped and locked before events, so the track record is real rather than reconstructed after the fact.
03 — Scored, then revised
The framework answers for itself
Calibration is tracked internally and the method is corrected where it errs. The record is shared with clients, not broadcast to the world.
Foundations
- Why do some confrontations end in settlement while others end in war?
- Why do some institutions act on a risk while others wait for proof?
- What signals appear before a system crosses a threshold?
Grounded in an original body of work on how civilizations hold together or fragment under stress, SIGMA's framework resolves the many dimensions of conflict into a single coherent structure — drawing on game theory, military strategy, decision psychology, complex-systems dynamics, and bargaining theory, among others — composed into one direction-aware architecture, auditable end to end within the firm, extended by AI and open-source intelligence, directed by human judgement.
Emergence
Large change is rarely a single event.
It emerges. Pressures accumulate — quietly, across years — until a system reaches a threshold and reorganizes into a new state. By the time the change is visible as an event, the shift that produced it is usually well underway. Reading the world well means looking past the headline to the layer beneath: which phase a system is in, what is gathering inside it, and the new state it may be moving toward.
The practice is built the same way: it begins where the method is proven — conflict and escalation — and is made to extend, over time, toward those slower emergences. The published forecast shows the surface; the substance is the layer beneath it — the pressures behind an event and where they lead, read in depth, and sustained, on the questions that are yours.
Services
Two ways to engage.
Advisory
Commissioned assessment
A finished judgement scoped to a specific question, exposure, or decision: the probabilities, the reasoning behind them, the indicators to watch, and what would force a revision. Conducted and delivered in confidence.
Membership
Standing intelligence
Access to the reasoning behind SIGMA's published forecasts — the Foundation Papers, continuing updates, and the committed ledger in full. Built for continuing awareness across the risks that matter to you, rather than any single decision.
Intelligence is the cheapest input to a large decision. The value of this work lies in the judgement it brings to the decisions that matter — because on exposures of consequence, being approximately right early is worth more than being precisely right late, and the difference is rarely small.
Membership
Beyond the published forecast.
Membership provides access to the reasoning behind SIGMA's published forecasts — the Foundation Papers, continuing updates as assessments change, and the committed ledger in full. It is intended for institutions, principals, and decision-makers who require the complete analytical case, not only the committed judgement.
Founding members hold their rate for as long as their membership continues.
Foundation Papers
The complete analytical case
The full reasoning behind each published assessment — the players, the incentives, the competing pathways, the calibration, and the limits of the forecast.
Analytical updates
Material changes
Updates published when an assessment materially changes, preserving a transparent record of how the analysis evolves.
Forecasting ledger
The pre-registered record
Access to SIGMA's committed forecasting ledger — archived vintages, historical assessments, and the evolution of each forecast.
For a team, institutional access covers up to five named users.
Principal
Matthew Keogh
SIGMA Futures Group is led by Matthew Keogh, an independent analyst working at the intersection of geopolitical forecasting and systemic risk. He built the firm's proprietary framework for structured conflict assessment — informed by his wider research concerning civilizational coordination: how complex societies cohere, absorb shocks, and manage the long-horizon and systemic pressures that precede conflict.
Through SIGMA, he seeks to connect rigorous strategic analysis with a longer-term inquiry into resilience, adaptation, and the futures that become possible when intelligence is applied across scales.
Forecasts
The open conflict record.
SIGMA maintains a public, committed record of where the world’s active conflicts are heading — each decomposed four ways, dated before it resolves, and scored against outcome. The tracker carries the current assessment across every situation followed.
17 active theatres · decomposed, committed, scored
Contact
Begin a conversation.
For commissioned work, membership enquiries, or to request a sample assessment, send a brief note. Messages are treated in confidence.
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