Coaching practices for Planning Assumptions Audit

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Planning 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 always tell myself it’ll take this long or cost this much, and somehow it always runs over and I’m scrambling
• 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.
• Every time I plan something I walk through the steps in my head and it feels totally doable in the time I’ve got

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. 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.
4. Estimate conservatively and act on the conservative number
   When uncertain, use a pessimistic estimate as your working assumption — not your best guess.
   Margin of Safety
5. 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
6. Reference class forecasting
   Before estimating, look up how long similar past projects actually took — not how they felt.
   The Planning Fallacy — Why Your Estimates Are Always Wrong
7. 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
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 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
10. Audit plans for scenario inflation
    Before committing to a plan that depends on multiple things going right, count the dependencies.
    The Conjunction Fallacy — When "More Details" Feels More Likely

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