All ideas and concepts that you are working on have numerous assumptions, this tool will help you recognise all the assumptions around your ideas and identify those that are more critical and uncertain. With this very simple framework you will be able to only to map your ideas, but also to prioritise the ones that are more critical.

Who could use this

This tool could be used, literally, by anyone that is trying to implement, design or build a new concept and needs to better understand how to prioritise their time and effort.

Framework explanation

In order to better understand the importance of the assumptions we will have to list the assumptions and segment them accordingly and plot them over a xy-axis chart. Below follow the simple steps to consider:

1. List the assumptions
2. Sort assumptions by impact
3. Arrange assumptions by level of uncertainty (lack of evidence)

When starting to list all the assumptions it will be important to think about them in the context of the idea we are trying to develop. What are the assumptions that must be true so that the idea is successful?

After listing all the assumptions we can envision we need to sort them considering their relative impact on the idea. How much impact do assumptions have? This assumption arrangement will be done over the y-axis from less impact on the bottom, to more impact on the top.

Now that we have a clear understanding of the overall assumptions and their impact on the idea, it is important to understand the level of uncertainty around each assumption, or their lack of evidence, and map them accordingly. Here we will use the x-axis with the assumptions with more certainty on the left when compared to assumptions that are uncertain on the right.

Slide

Here you will find a slide example. Soon we will implement a feature for anyone to download all the tools that we are building.