Advisory:
Assumption Architecture
A foresight methodology built around the assumptions your leadership team is bringing to the decision.
Why you need an assumption architecture.
Most leadership teams aren’t held back by what they don’t know. They’re held back by what they each assume — about the market, the moment, the opportunity, the risk — and rarely have the space to test those assumptions against each other.
Untracked assumptions are the silent risk in market judgment. The gap between what leadership believes about a market and what is actually unfolding there represents both the largest source of missed opportunity and the least visible source of risk.
Assumption Architecture is built to close that gap.
What Assumption Architecture is
A structured methodology for surfacing, testing, and upgrading the assumptions an executive team is bringing to a strategic market judgment. It produces three things:
A Provocation Book — a custom research document that paints the market landscape from the outside-looking-in.
An Assumption Diagnostic — a survey derived from the Book, completed by participating leaders, that logs how each is reading the market.
A Foresight Workshop — a structured leadership conversation that uses the divergence visible in the Diagnostic to upgrade the team’s collective judgment.
Each component is concrete. Each is built bespoke to the strategic question. Together they convert hidden, divergent assumptions into a higher-quality strategic conversation.
The Geometry of the Work
A structured methodology for surfacing, testing, and upgrading the assumptions an executive team is bringing to a strategic market judgment. It produces three things:
A Provocation Book — a custom research document that paints the market landscape from the outside-looking-in.
An Assumption Diagnostic — a survey derived from the Book, completed by participating leaders, that logs how each is reading the market.
A Foresight Workshop — a structured leadership conversation that uses the divergence visible in the Diagnostic to upgrade the team’s collective judgment.
Each component is concrete. Each is built bespoke to the strategic question. Together they convert hidden, divergent assumptions into a higher-quality strategic conversation.
Methodology
The methodology proceeds in five phases. Each is bespoke to the engagement.
Define the strategic question
Every engagement begins with a concrete strategic question that the leadership team is reckoning with: a market the company is entering, an environment that has shifted, a decision the team faces about where to invest or withdraw. The question is sharpened in scoping conversations until it is specific enough to research and broad enough to surface real divergence.
Compose the Provocation Book
A custom research document — typically 60-90 pages — that paints the wider landscape relevant to the strategic question. The Book draws on extensive primary and secondary research, synthesizes the geopolitical, economic, social, technological, cultural, and regulatory forces shaping the market, and structures its findings to provoke conversation rather than to recommend action.
The Book names uncertainties, not risks and opportunities. It paints the wider landscape; the translation into business implications is the leadership team’s to make.
Each section ends with a coda — Assumptions, Complicated. The section text is the evidence. The coda is the conversation it should provoke.
Derive the Assumption Diagnostic
As the Book is finalized, a set of assumption statements is derived from it. These become the engagement’s Assumption Diagnostic — completed by each participating leader before the Workshop.
The statements are tightly tied to the strategic question and framed so leaders must reveal how they’re reading the market. Will the regulatory environment for AI products in this country tighten significantly in the next three years? Is consumer demand in this market more likely to soften or harden as housing prices fluctuate? Is this country’s domestic growth agenda likely to succeed or falter in the next decade? Each is a working assumption, answered individually and confidentially.
Map alignment and divergence
The diagnostic responses are aggregated to produce the Workshop’s central artifact: a map of where the team is aligned, where it is sharply divided, and where uncertainty is being interpreted in fundamentally different ways.
In aligned areas, the question becomes whether shared confidence is justified — and whether the research complicates the consensus in ways the team has not yet appreciated.
In divergent areas, the question becomes: what is each side seeing that the other is not? Is the disagreement caused by different evidence, different interpretations, different time horizons, or genuine uncertainty?
Convene the Foresight Workshop
The Foresight Workshop is where the team’s collective judgment sharpens. The leadership team works through the assumptions they hold in common and the assumptions they hold differently, with the Book’s evidence available throughout.
The Workshop produces a triage. By the end of it, the team can typically distinguish three kinds of strategic uncertainty:
Assumptions that can be upgraded. The Workshop conversation, with the Book’s evidence in the room, is sufficient to revise the team’s working assumptions and align around a more nuanced interpretation.
Disagreements that need further research. The Workshop reveals divergence whose resolution requires deeper inquiry on a specific topic. A targeted deep-dive is commissioned to bring back the evidence the team needs.
Uncertainties that must be managed. Some divergences will not resolve through better conversation, because the underlying uncertainty is genuinely irreducible. The methodology extends into scenario thinking — producing a small set of contrasting plausible futures the team can then build into its strategic planning.
The methodology does not force false certainty.
What an engagement looks like
A typical engagement runs three to six months end-to-end. The shape:
Scoping — one to two conversations with the convening team to sharpen the strategic question and define the participating leadership group.
Research and Book production — six to twelve weeks. Field interviews, document analysis, and synthesis.
Diagnostic design and administration — assumption statements derived from the Book, distributed with the Book two to three weeks before the Workshop.
Foresight Workshop — a single full-day or two-half-day session, in person or virtual, with the participating leadership group.
Post-Workshop — depending on what the Workshop reveals, the engagement may extend into commissioned deep-dives or into scenario development. These extensions are scoped separately.
Most leaders will invest one to two hours in advance, for reading and the diagnostic, plus the Workshop itself.
When this is the right work
Assumption Architecture is designed for a specific kind of moment: when an executive team is facing a volatile or unfamiliar market and wants to make better decisions, together.
Signals that this is the right work:
- Your team is making (or about to make) a meaningful commitment of capital, attention, or strategic positioning in a market environment your team finds difficult to read.
- You suspect that members of the leadership team are interpreting the market quite differently — but the divergence has not been made visible, and you do not yet have a structured way to surface it.
- You have access to sector expertise and market intelligence, but you are not confident the team’s collective judgment about the wider landscape — geopolitical, technological, cultural, regulatory — is yet strong enough to make the decisions ahead.
- Your decision cannot wait, but it also cannot be made well by accelerating familiar processes.
The methodology is not a substitute for sector expertise, market intelligence, or internal business knowledge. It assumes the team already has those. What it adds is a structured way to integrate contextual intelligence with the team’s own judgment — and a way to convert hidden divergences into strategic clarity.
Reference engagements
Convened by the regional and global leadership team. The strategic question: how to upgrade the team’s collective judgment about a market where its leaders held quietly divergent views about what was driving demand and where the country was headed.
The engagement produced a Provocation Book of approximately 90 pages, structured around four research questions about demand drivers, cultural dynamics, and the market’s domestic and external uncertainties. Each section ended with a coda of complicated assumptions — sharpening conversations the leadership team needed to have but had not yet had.
The Assumption Diagnostic surfaced three areas of sharp internal divergence — including assumptions about consumer behaviour the team had been quietly operating from for years. The Workshop turned those divergences into the agenda for the leadership team’s strategic review.
Convened by the global CEO. The strategic question: how to prepare the business for a wider range of plausible futures than the team felt ready for, in a market that had been driving global growth but whose long-term trajectory had become genuinely uncertain.
The engagement began with a Discovery Book and an Assumption Diagnostic that surfaced two genuine, irreducible uncertainties: whether the country’s domestic model would succeed or falter, and whether the international environment would trend toward globalization or decoupling. These uncertainties could not be resolved through further conversation alone.
The methodology extended into a full scenarios process. Four contrasting scenarios for the future of the market were developed — each a plausible, unsettling “World in 20XX” — and the global c-suite workshopped them, identifying which decisions needed to be hedged against which futures.
A targeted deep-dive on a specific contextual topic was commissioned separately to address one of the divergences the Workshop had surfaced as research-resolvable.
The scenarios were embedded into that year’s strategic planning processes at both the global and regional level.
On AI
AI tools are used inside Assumption Architecture engagements to accelerate research synthesis, fact-checking, source organization, and updating of figures. They do not author the Provocation Book. They do not derive the Assumption Diagnostic. They do not facilitate the Foresight Workshop. The methodology’s distinctive moves are made by people. AI accelerates the work without authoring it.
Two AI-enabled service extensions are in active development. The first is a persistent interface to the Book’s reasoning — letting leadership teams re-engage with its complications as the world shifts. The second is a weak-signal monitor for the leading indicators each Workshop identifies — surfacing relevant developments as they emerge.
Strategic context keeps evolving. The methodology evolves with it.
About the practice
Assumption Architecture is convened by Chris Kutarna and a small team of researchers and convenors at New Geo. Its closest intellectual ancestors are the practice of strategic foresight, scenario planning, and the convening methodology described in How to Basecamp. What Assumption Architecture adds to those traditions is the diagnostic move — the deliberate logging of leadership-team assumptions before the conversation begins — that makes the divergences visible enough to be reckoned with.
The work is built for executive teams facing decisions that genuinely matter. It is not a service Chris and the team take on lightly, and it is not built for clients who want a deck of recommendations. It is built for clients who want their leadership team to make a better decision than it would otherwise have made.
How to begin
Every Assumption Architecture engagement begins with a conversation about the strategic question your team is reckoning with. That conversation is the first step in scoping — figuring out whether the methodology is the right fit, which leaders should be involved, what the Provocation Book should focus on, and what shape the engagement should take.
To start that conversation, reach out below. Initial inquiries receive a thoughtful response within a week, regardless of whether the engagement turns out to be a fit.