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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Operations Barrier Analysis |  Product Discovery Assumption Mapping |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | 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. | For a risk that can only be managed through multiple layers of protection, the method examines the effectiveness of each barrier. It shows where safeguards are missing, too weak, or fail under real conditions. | When assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 45-90 min | 2-4 h | 45-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | 2-8 | 2-6 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Barrier Inventory, Failure Analysis per Barrier, Action Backlog | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | Root causeSafetyIncident | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation |