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| Criterion |  Decision Making Pre-Mortem |  Innovation Design Thinking |  Decision Making Assumption Surfacing |  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. | For complex user problems with an uncertain cause, the method connects observation, interpretation, and experiment into a learning cycle. It keeps the focus on real needs and avoids premature solution language. This produces robust decisions for product and service. | 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 assumptions still sit unordered in the room, it weighs uncertainty against leverage. It makes visible which hypotheses should be checked first. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | High | Low | Medium |
Timedifferent | 20–45 min | 1 Tag bis mehrere Wochen | 45-90 min | 45-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | Small cross-functional group | 4-10 | 2-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Risk list, Mitigation plan, Assumption log | Problem Statement, Prototype, Test Learnings | Assumption List, Critical Assumptions, Learning Plan | Assumption map, Test backlog, Risk ranking |
Tagsno overlap | RiskDecisionFailurePlanning | InnovationPrototypeResearch | AssumptionsRiskDecisionDiscovery | AssumptionsRiskExperimentsValidation |