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| Criterion | ![]() Engineering Fault Isolation | ![]() Decision Making Pre-Mortem | ![]() Decision Making Decision Tree | ![]() Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | In technical failures, the visible symptom often gets mixed up with the actual cause. Fault Isolation narrows the fault space and progressively reduces which part of the system is truly affected. | 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. | For decisions with follow-on paths and dependencies, a linear comparison is often not enough. A Decision Tree shows how options branch under conditions and which consequences hang on each branch. | 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. |
Complexitydifferent | Medium | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 30-180 min | 20–45 min | 30-90 min | 45-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 1-6 | Small cross-functional group | 1-6 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Fault Isolation Map, Test Log, Excluded Hypotheses, Narrowed Fault Area | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Decision Tree, Option Map, Assumption List | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan |
Tagsno overlap | TroubleshootingDiagnosisEngineering | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | DecisionTreeOptions | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery |



