[ghaff]

It came out of research at Harvard (by the authors of Getting to Yes) and is related to game theory. So it's academic (and therefore jargony) but is probably also intended to be more precise than alternatives or options.

That said, for day to day use, understand your alternatives if the parties can't come to an agreement works perfectly well.

[robertlagrant]

Yeah, makes sense. It's possible no-one felt it was okay to say, "do we just mean 'fallback' or 'plan B'?"