Coaching practices for Plan Assumptions Audit

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Plan Assumptions Audit, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My plan feels solid until I notice it quietly depends on a whole stack of things just going my way
• My whole plan quietly rests on a handful of things I’ve just taken for granted
• I’m about to commit to this timeline and on paper it all looks fine, but I have a nagging feeling I’m glossing over the ways it could go sideways because admitting them now feels like talking myself out of it before I’ve even started.
• I’m all-in on this plan and can barely make myself imagine it going wrong
• On paper my reasoning checks out, but the conclusion still feels shaky and I can’t locate why

Practices that may help

1. Name the assumptions that must hold for the plan to work
   Every plan rests on assumptions — list them and ask how likely each one is.
   Margin of Safety
2. Map and stress-test your key assumptions
   Before executing, list the assumptions the plan depends on — then ask which ones would kill it if wrong.
   Red Teaming: Stress-Testing Plans Before They Fail
3. Run a premortem before committing
   Imagine the project has already failed and work backwards to find why.
   The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong
4. Run a pre-mortem from the outside-view perspective
   Imagine the project has failed — then ask which base-rate failure type caused it.
   The Outside View
5. Surface the hidden premises
   Find the unstated assumptions that the argument needs to work.
   Argument Mapping
6. The premortem (imagine the project already failed)
   Before starting, assume the plan has already failed and ask why — then fix it now.
   Premeditatio Malorum, in Depth
7. Surface and examine the assumptions you are making
   Name the assumptions filling the gap between the data you selected and the interpretation you reached.
   The Ladder of Inference
8. Run a pre-mortem before committing to a plan
   Imagine the plan has already failed and ask what went wrong.
   Confirmation Bias: Seeing What You Expect to See
9. The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong
   The planning fallacy is the well-replicated tendency to underestimate completion times even when you know your past projects ran late. The fix is not to "try harder" — it is to switch from imagining the ideal future scenario to consulting your own base-rate history and similar projects.
10. Invoke the outside view before committing to any significant plan
    Before finalizing a plan or forecast, ask "How did similar things go?" as the first checkpoint.
    The Outside View

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.