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| Criterion | ![]() Systems Thinking Rich Picture | ![]() Decision Making Trade-off Analysis | ![]() Systems Thinking Current Reality Tree | ![]() Decision Making Constraint Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | A Rich Picture brings an unclear situation onto a shared drawing. It captures actors, tensions, information flows, and blind spots before the team jumps to solutions too early. | With limited resources, quality, speed, cost, and risk almost always compete with each other. Trade-off Analysis makes these tensions explicit and prevents decisions from producing hidden side effects. | A Current Reality Tree condenses many symptoms into a few causal chains. The method makes visible which core problems drive several negative effects at once. | 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 | Medium | High | Low |
Timedifferent | 30-90 min | 45-120 min | 2-6 h | 30-90 min |
Participantsdifferent | 2-10 | 2-8 | 3-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop | Workshop + async |
Outputdifferent | Rich Picture, Problem Framing Notes | Trade-off Matrix, Criteria List, Decision Rationale, Accepted Downsides | Current Reality Tree, Core Problems, Intervention Ideas | Constraint List, Hard/Soft Classification, Option Impact Notes, Decision Boundaries |
Tagsno overlap | Systems thinkingSoft systemsFramingVisualization | TradeoffsDecisionCriteriaOptions | Systems thinkingRoot causeConstraintsCausality | ConstraintsDecisionPlanningOptions |



