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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  Operations Root Cause Analysis |  Operations Failure Mode and Effects 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. | When a problem keeps recurring and the cause stays unclear, the method exposes the underlying mechanism. It separates symptom, guess, and robust explanation from one another. | For a process, product, or service with noticeable failure risks, the method assesses possible failure modes in advance. It directs attention to combinations of occurrence, effect, and detectability. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Low | Medium | High |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 45-90 min | 1-4 h | 2-6 h |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | 2-8 | 3-8 | 3-10 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Problem Statement, Cause Hypotheses, Confirmed Causes, Action Plan | FMEA Table, Risk Priority, Mitigation Actions |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident | RiskQualityOperationsRoot cause |