Fact, assumption, constraint and wish
These four arrive inside the same sentence and require entirely different handling. Until they are separated, every judgement built on top is built on sand.
Four things in one sentence
Our product is competitive in Europe, and if someone helps us promote it we can double next year. That sounds like a single judgement. It contains four things of entirely different kinds.
Competitive in Europe is an unverified fact. It may hold or not, depending on who the comparison is against, in which price band, and whether the certification and after-sales exist to support it. It is checkable. It has not been checked.
If someone helps us promote it is an untested assumption. It assumes the problem sits at the exposure layer. If buyers are in fact seeing the company and declining to proceed, acting on that assumption spends the money on the gate that was never broken.
Next year carries an omitted constraint: cash, capacity, certification lead time, team bandwidth. Those decide whether next year is a feasible window at all. Being unstated does not make a constraint absent.
Double is a wish. Wishes are not a problem in themselves; they supply the energy. The problem is that a wish routinely gets treated as one of the first three, after which nobody asks whether it holds.
Handling each one
A fact: go and check it. Find the original document or a source that survives review. If it cannot be found, demote it to an assumption rather than leaving it in the fact column because it sounds reasonable.
An assumption: design the cheapest test that could disprove it. The value of an assumption is not whether it is right but whether it can be tested cheaply. An untestable assumption defers the risk to a more expensive moment.
A constraint: write it down explicitly. Once constraints are visible the discussion shifts from whether to do this to what is achievable under these conditions, which is a question an owner can actually decide.
A wish: keep it, but keep it apart from the other three. A wish sets the intensity of the direction, not the feasibility of the route. Moving it out of the judgement area makes it easier to see what has to be solved before it can happen.
What happens if they are not separated
Unseparated, all four enter the plan and get executed with the same confidence. When it stalls halfway, it is usually no longer possible to tell whether the fact was wrong, the assumption was wrong, the constraint was underestimated, or the wish exceeded the conditions from the start.
This is also why a review asks whether the original assumption still holds, rather than only whether the task was completed. If the assumptions were never marked, there is nothing to go back and check.
The same distinction runs on this site. Every statement carries an evidence level; unverified material is not written as fact, and undecided matters are marked undecided. A discipline applied to other people's evidence has to be applied to your own first, or it does not hold.
Recent judgements
Registered statements used here
- In a client's own account, fact, assumption, constraint and wish arrive inside the same sentence. Until they are separated, every judgement built on top is built on sand.[public]
- Model output is a candidate signal. Anything without a source, or that cannot be cross-checked, does not become a stated fact.[public]
- Opportunity and preference are assessed separately. A large market does not mean this company should enter it, and a country the owner likes does not mean a workable route into it exists.[public]
- A review is not a check on task completion. It asks whether the original assumptions still hold, whether the market has produced new evidence, whether the organisation can carry the load, and whether the objective, route or resourcing needs to change.[public]