The Stress Test is where MAIA pressure-tests your decision. Based on everything it knows about your decision — the dependencies, the timeline, the structural analysis — MAIA generates a set of disruption scenarios. Each one represents a realistic threat that could affect your decision's viability.
How Scenarios Are Generated
MAIA doesn't invent disruptions from thin air. Every scenario is derived from your specific decision context:
- Dependencies identified in your decision landscape
- Structural fragility points and silent failure zones
- Industry-specific risk patterns for your sector
- Temporal dependencies within your chosen timeline
Each scenario has a name, a 2–3 sentence description explaining what triggers it and why it matters for your decision specifically, a severity rating, and a source attribution.
Selecting Scenarios
MAIA presents every generated scenario — no truncation, no summaries. You choose which ones to simulate:
- "Run All" — simulates every scenario. This gives you the most complete picture but takes longer.
- Select specific scenarios — pick the ones most relevant to your concerns. If you know your biggest risk is a supply chain disruption, focus there.
You must make an explicit selection before the simulation runs. MAIA won't auto-select for you.
What Happens After You Select
Each selected scenario is propagated through your dependency map at multiple depths — tracing first-order effects, indirect consequences, and deep cascades. This is the cascade simulation stage. For each scenario, you'll see:
- The trigger — what initiates the disruption
- The propagation chain — step by step, how the disruption moves through your system
- The end state — where the cascade terminates and what's affected
After cascades, MAIA designs countermeasures — stabilizers derived from the simulation, not invented generically. Each countermeasure maps to specific disruptions and tells you what risk it addresses, how feasible it is, and what it depends on.
Cross-Scenario Patterns
After simulating all selected scenarios, MAIA identifies patterns that appear across multiple disruptions. These cross-scenario findings often reveal the most important insights — systemic vulnerabilities that aren't visible when looking at one scenario in isolation.