[thecleaner]

Knocking down assumptions and attacking your ideas is a great thing. Very useful when done right but most ideas are shit and will collapse under careful analysis so people dont do it as much because it can be discouraging. But this thing has a formal name - Red Teaming. DoD wrote a great memo on how to do it right. There are other tools to solidify and stress test ideas such as simulation and game-play. I came across these while reading Farsighted. Excellent book.

[petewailes]

It's also just basic hypothesis testing - formulating and then proving/disproving a null hypothesis. But most of the people I talk to can't remember what that means, if they ever knew. Hence assumptions and attacking as the language - they can work that out.

Also, Farsighted is a great book. If you liked it, you'd also get a kick out of Creating Great Choices, The Choice Factory, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense, and How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business.