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| Criterion |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Operations Root Cause Analysis |  Operations Kepner-Tregoe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | Plans often contain assumptions that were never openly stated and remain dangerous precisely because of that. Assumption Surfacing makes these silent premises visible and prioritizes which of them carry the initiative or could sink it. | In early initiatives with many uncertainties, planning quickly turns too optimistic. A pre-mortem makes the expected failure visible in advance and sharpens the view of causes, gaps, and countermeasures. | When a problem keeps recurring and the cause stays unclear, the method exposes the underlying mechanism. It separates symptom, guess, and robust explanation from one another. | For a disturbance that's hard to pin down, the method cleanly separates problem, cause, and decision. It reduces mixing when symptoms allow several interpretations. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | High |
Timedifferent | 45-90 min | 20–45 min | 1-4 h | 2-8 h |
Participantsdifferent | 2-8 | Small cross-functional group | 3-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Problem Statement, Cause Hypotheses, Confirmed Causes, Action Plan | Problem Analysis, Decision Analysis, Risk Plan |
Tagsno overlap | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident | Problem solvingRoot causeDecisionOperations |