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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Systems Thinking Evaporating Cloud |  Decision Making Constraint Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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. | The method makes visible why two seemingly incompatible demands arise and which assumption must be tested to resolve the conflict. | 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 | Low | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 45-90 min | 60-120 min | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | 2-8 | 2-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Conflict Cloud, Assumption List, Breakthrough Ideas, Next Experiments | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | Theory of ConstraintsAssumptionsSystems thinking | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions |