analysis-of-competing-hypotheses
analysis-of-competing-hypotheses
A parallel implementation of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH), the structured analytic technique developed by Richards Heuer at the CIA and laid out in Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (1999). ACH defeats one failure: the mind picks a favored explanation early, then reads every new fact as confirmation. It forces all hypotheses to compete on the same evidence at once and ranks them by disconfirmation, the most likely being the one with the least evidence against it, not the most evidence for it.
When to use
The user faces a question with several rival explanations and wants a disciplined adjudication rather than a hunch. Triggers: "which of these is actually true", "what's the most likely explanation", "help me rule out alternatives", "ACH", "competing hypotheses", "is this X or Y or Z". It pairs well with storm-research: STORM gathers the evidence and the perspectives; ACH decides which story that evidence actually supports.
Reach for it when the cost of anchoring on the wrong explanation is high: incident root-cause, diagnosis, intelligence-style "what is the other side doing", attributing a trend to a cause, or any "we think it's X" claim that deserves to be tested against the alternatives.
Do not use it for problems with a single obvious answer, for value choices (ACH adjudicates what is true, not what is preferable, use a weighted-decision-matrix for that), or for forecasting a number (use scenario-planning).
Inputs
- QUESTION (required): the issue under analysis, framed as something rival explanations can answer. If it is vague ("what should we do about churn"), narrow it to a truth question first ("what is the primary cause of the Q2 churn spike"). Ask one or two clarifying questions if needed.
- EVIDENCE (optional): any facts, observations, reports, or data the user already has. If none is supplied, the skill gathers it in Stage 2 using whatever retrieval the runtime offers.
- ROLE (optional): who acts on the answer, so the report can pitch the "so what". Defaults to "a decision-maker who must act on the most likely explanation."