Assumption Debt
The invisible accumulation of unvalidated strategic assumptions that erode the integrity of a strategy over time — the strategic equivalent of technical debt.
Why it matters
Every strategy is built on assumptions about customers, markets, competitors, and technology. When these assumptions go untracked, they accumulate like technical debt — invisible, compounding, and eventually catastrophic. A strategy launched with ten assumptions that remain unvalidated for six months is not the same strategy that was approved — it is a hypothesis running on expired data. Assumption debt explains why strategies that looked brilliant at the offsite collapse twelve months later: not because the strategy was wrong, but because the world changed and nobody checked.
Related terms
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