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Criterion
Paper illustration of a four-column Kanban board with limited ongoing work, a visible blocker and a review loop.
Engineering
Kanban
A hypothetical failure makes concrete risks, signals, and fitting mitigations visible.
Decision Making
Pre-Mortem
Paper illustration of an assumption matrix with prioritized test cards
Decision Making
Assumption Surfacing
Paper illustration for Constraint Analysis.
Decision Making
Constraint Analysis
Purposedifferent
When work sits in too many parallel streams, throughput suffers and no one sees the bottlenecks. Kanban makes the flow of work visible and limits overload so a system becomes calmer and more predictable.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.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 an initiative stalls, the limit often lies not in the idea but in hard or soft boundary conditions. Constraint Analysis separates these limits and shows which of them can actually be shaped.
Complexitydifferent
MediumLowLowLow
Timedifferent
Ongoing20–45 min45-90 min30-90 min
Participantsdifferent
2-12Small cross-functional group2-82-8
Formatdifferent
Workshop + asyncWorkshopWorkshop + asyncWorkshop + async
Outputdifferent
Kanban board, WIP policies, Flow metricsRisk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption logAssumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning PlanConstraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries
Tagsno overlap
FlowVisual managementDelivery
RiskDecisionFailurePlanning
AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery
ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions
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