---
name: strategic-assumption-stress-tester
description: "Extracts the load-bearing assumptions inside a strategic plan, ranks each by importance and vulnerability, and generates adversarial challenges using pre-mortem and devil's-advocate techniques — producing a risk-ranked assumption log with a validation or mitigation action for every high-risk item. Use when pressure-testing a strategy, business case, expansion plan, or major investment before committing capital or board approval."
argument-hint: "[strategy-summary] [decision-context]"
allowed-tools: ["Read"]
---

# Strategic Assumption Stress-Tester

## Purpose
Surface the hidden assumptions a strategy silently depends on, rank them by how much damage a wrong assumption would cause and how likely it is to be wrong, then attack each one adversarially — so leadership commits with eyes open and a concrete plan to validate the riskiest bets before spending real money.

## When to Use
Invoke this skill when the user asks to:
- Pressure-test a strategic plan, business case, or investment thesis before board or committee sign-off
- Run a pre-mortem on a market entry, expansion, acquisition, or product launch
- Identify the assumptions a plan is quietly betting the outcome on
- Play devil's advocate against a strategy that "everyone agrees on"
- Build a risk-ranked assumption log with validation actions before capital allocation
- Find the reasons a plan could fail before, rather than after, it fails

## Inputs Required
Before starting, collect:
- **The strategy or plan**: A summary of what is being proposed, in the user's own words
- **The core objective**: The specific outcome the plan is meant to achieve (revenue target, market share, margin, timeline)
- **Key resource commitments**: Capital, headcount, or time being wagered
- **Decision context**: What decision this feeds — board approval, budget lock, go/no-go, funding round
- **Known constraints**: Regulatory, competitive, operational, or financial limits already understood
- **Time horizon**: When the plan is expected to pay off
- **Confidence level**: Where leadership currently feels most and least certain (optional)

If confidence level or time horizon is missing, infer from the plan's structure and note the assumption.

## Instructions

### Step 1: Extract the Load-Bearing Assumptions
Read the plan and identify the assumptions it silently depends on — the beliefs that, if false, break the outcome. Force these out into the open across six domains:

- **Market assumptions**: Demand size, willingness to pay, buyer behavior, timing of adoption
- **Competitive assumptions**: Rival response, moat durability, whether incumbents stay passive
- **Financial assumptions**: Unit economics, CAC/LTV, margin structure, capital efficiency, payback period
- **Operational assumptions**: Execution capacity, hiring speed, supply chain, technical feasibility
- **Customer assumptions**: The problem is real, urgent, and the customer will change behavior to solve it
- **Internal assumptions**: Organizational alignment, capability to execute, cultural fit, sustained leadership focus

Aim for 12–20 distinct assumptions. Separate stated assumptions (explicit in the plan) from unstated assumptions (implicit, and usually more dangerous). Label each.

### Step 2: Score Importance and Vulnerability
Rate every assumption on two axes, each 1–5:

- **Importance (blast radius)**: If this assumption is wrong, how much of the plan collapses? (5 = plan fails entirely; 1 = minor adjustment)
- **Vulnerability (likelihood of being wrong)**: Based on evidence quality, precedent, and how much is unknown, how likely is this to prove false? (5 = little evidence, high uncertainty; 1 = well-validated)

Compute a **Risk Score = Importance × Vulnerability** (range 1–25). The critical zone is any assumption scoring **≥15**, or any importance-5 assumption regardless of vulnerability — those are single points of failure.

### Step 3: Run the Pre-Mortem
Project forward to a defined future point (use the time horizon) and assume the plan has already failed. Working backward, write the failure narrative:

- **The obituary**: 3–4 sentences describing how and why the plan died, in past tense
- **Root cause chain**: Trace the failure to the specific assumption(s) that broke first
- **Silent killers**: Identify 2–3 failure modes that would not show up in a standard risk review because no one thought to question them

### Step 4: Generate Adversarial Challenges (Devil's Advocate)
For each assumption in the critical zone (Risk Score ≥15), mount a serious attack:

- **The challenge**: The strongest specific argument for why this assumption is wrong — not a generic "what if it doesn't work"
- **The disconfirming evidence to look for**: What would you observe in the real world if this assumption were false?
- **The base rate**: How often do plans like this get this assumption right? (Cite the general pattern — e.g., new-market revenue forecasts typically overshoot.)
- **The steelman rebuttal**: The best defense of the assumption, so the challenge is fair, not reflexively negative

### Step 5: Assign Validation or Mitigation Actions
For every critical-zone assumption, prescribe one concrete action:

- **Validate** (cheap test): The lowest-cost experiment, data pull, customer interview, or pilot that would confirm or kill the assumption before full commitment
- **Mitigate** (structural hedge): A change to the plan that reduces exposure if the assumption proves wrong — staged commitment, off-ramp, contingency budget, or fallback path
- **Trigger and threshold**: The specific signal or metric that means "stop" or "proceed" — so the decision isn't left to gut feel later

Classify each action by cost/speed: **Cheap & fast** (do before committing), **Moderate** (do in first phase), or **Expensive** (build into stage-gate).

### Step 6: Deliver the Verdict
State a clear position:
- Which 2–3 assumptions must be validated before any capital is committed
- Whether the plan is **Ready to commit**, **Commit with conditions**, or **Not ready — validate first**
- Be direct. The value of this skill is refusing to hedge.

## Output Format
- **Structure**: Assumption log as a ranked table, followed by pre-mortem narrative, adversarial challenges for critical items, and a verdict
- **Length**: 1,100–1,500 words
- **Format**: Risk-ranked table for the assumption log; structured prose for pre-mortem and challenges; bulleted actions
- **Sections**: Assumption Log (ranked table with Importance / Vulnerability / Risk Score / Stated-or-Unstated) → Pre-Mortem → Adversarial Challenges (critical zone only) → Validation & Mitigation Actions → Verdict
- **Tone**: Rigorous, skeptical, board-room direct — the trusted advisor who says the uncomfortable thing before the money is spent, not after

## Quality Checklist
Before delivering output, verify:
- [ ] 12–20 distinct assumptions are extracted, each labeled Stated or Unstated
- [ ] Every assumption has an Importance score, Vulnerability score, and computed Risk Score (Importance × Vulnerability)
- [ ] The assumption log is sorted by Risk Score, highest first
- [ ] The pre-mortem is written in past tense and traces failure to specific named assumptions
- [ ] Every critical-zone assumption (Risk Score ≥15) has an adversarial challenge with a steelman rebuttal
- [ ] Every critical-zone assumption has a validation or mitigation action with a defined trigger/threshold
- [ ] The verdict states one of the three positions and names the assumptions that must be validated first

## Notes
- The most dangerous assumptions are almost always unstated — they feel so obvious no one wrote them down. Spend extra effort surfacing these.
- A steelman rebuttal on every challenge is mandatory; unbalanced negativity gets dismissed by the room and destroys the skill's credibility.
- Importance-5 assumptions with low vulnerability still deserve a cheap validation test — a single point of failure is worth a small insurance premium.
- Encourage the user to run the cheap-and-fast validations before the next decision meeting; the goal is to convert the two or three riskiest beliefs from opinion into evidence before capital moves.

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## How to use this skill

This file is a Claude Code skill in [Anthropic's standard format](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills) — markdown with YAML frontmatter at the top.

**Installing in Claude Code:**
- `~/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md` — auto-loads in every session anywhere on your machine (recommended for skills you'll use across multiple projects)
- `<your-project>/.claude/skills/<folder-name>/SKILL.md` — auto-loads only when working in that project (recommended for project-specific skills)

Restart Claude Code or open a new session to register.

**Using in Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AI tools:**

1. Drag this file into a new chat, or copy and paste its contents
2. Send your task or request as your next message — the AI will apply the skill where it fits

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