Assumption-Based Planning: A Tool for Reducing Avoidable Surprises (RAND Studies in Policy Analysis)

Avoid the High Cost of Unchallenged Assumptions

There’s a tool that can help you test whether your deliberate strategy or a new emergent one will be a fruitful approach. It forces you to articulate what assumptions need to be proved true in order for the strategy to succeed. The academics who created this process, Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath, called it “discovery-driven planning,” but it migh

of assumptions: Necessary, Parallel, and Sufficiency.

Unique product development takes place in the Complex Domain. This is where there are unknown-unknowns and acting in the space changes the space. Cause and effect can only be deduced in retrospect. Whereas the previous two domains are ordered, this domain is unordered. There is no such thing as best practice or even good practice because activity i

start to ask what things about it you do know.