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| Criterion | ![]() Delivery Cost of Delay | ![]() Decision Making Assumption Surfacing | ![]() Operations Fishbone Diagram | ![]() Operations Kepner-Tregoe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | Helps clarify scope, order, and delivery flow in concrete terms. It makes work, constraints, and sequence manageable. The result is captured as a Cost of Delay table and prioritization sequence. | 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. | When a problem has several possible contributing factors, the method sorts causes by cause areas. It prevents an initial hunch from blocking the view of other plausible drivers. | 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 | High | Low | Low | High |
Timedifferent | 90-180 min | 45-90 min | 30-60 min | 2-8 h |
Participantsdifferent | 3-8 | 2-8 | 2-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | CoD Table, Prioritization Sequence | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Fishbone Diagram, Cause Categories, Investigation Backlog | Problem Analysis, Decision Analysis, Risk Plan |
Tagsno overlap | PrioritizationDeliveryEconomicsDecision | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | Root causeQualityOperations | Problem solvingRoot causeDecisionOperations |



