If you have named the problem — you have a working hypothesis about what is limiting supply chain capability and what kind of investment might address it — but you have not yet committed to a direction and are actively testing whether your read is correct, this is where the quality of the eventual decision is most often determined.

This stage sits between general orientation and vendor evaluation. You are past the point of wondering whether something needs to change. You are not yet at the point of inviting vendors to present. The work here is resolving what kind of solution architecture is actually appropriate for your situation — before any vendor has had the opportunity to anchor the conversation.

This is also the stage where independent peer input is most scarce and most valuable. Vendors cannot be trusted as advisors here because they have a stake in the outcome. Consultants often do too. Reference calls are vendor-selected. The only genuinely independent source is a practitioner who has resolved a comparable architecture question in a comparable context with no commercial stake in the outcome. That is what BestPractice.Club is designed to provide.

Why the Test Assumptions stage?

Decisions move into this stage when there is a named problem, a working hypothesis about what is causing it, and a growing sense that something needs to be done — but before any solution provider has been formally engaged.

The conditions that characterise this stage are: a diagnosis that has been formed internally but not yet independently tested, assumptions about root cause and solution direction that feel settled but have not been exposed to peer challenge, and options that are beginning to narrow before the architecture direction question has been resolved. The risk is not that the hypothesis is wrong — it is that it hardens into a commitment before it has been properly stress-tested by someone with no stake in the answer.

The practitioners who navigate this stage well are those who actively sought out independent challenge before their thinking solidified. Those who did not often find themselves revisiting the diagnosis later, at significantly greater cost.

Decisions typically move into later stages when certain conditions begin to show up:

• a clearly defined problem,
• a shared sense of what success looks like,
• visible senior sponsorship,
• identifiable trade-offs,
• and some form of commitment pressure (time, budget, reputation, or dependency).

Based on your responses, those signals don’t yet appear to be consistently present. That doesn’t mean a decision isn’t forming — only that it hasn’t yet solidified into something that most stakeholders would recognise as a concrete project requiring sustained commitment of time, attention, or capital.

In practice, this usually means that while there is intent or concern, key elements of a well-framed decision are still emerging: the real alternatives may not yet be clear, consequences are still being explored, uncertainty remains high, and it’s not yet obvious what would be hard to reverse later.

This is a common — and often sensible — position in complex contexts, where acting too early can be riskier than waiting until the decision is framed clearly enough for others to engage with it confidently.

Teams at this stage often move forward with more certainty than is warranted.

Common patterns include:

• Treating early hypotheses as settled decisions — moving to solution evaluation before the problem framing has been independently tested
• Relying on a narrow set of perspectives — particularly those of people who already share the same assumptions
• Assuming alignment where assumptions actually differ across teams — which only becomes visible when finance, IT, or leadership engage
• Skipping the architecture direction question — moving directly from problem awareness to vendor demonstrations without resolving what kind of solution is actually appropriate

Because progress feels real at this stage, these gaps often go unchallenged until they surface later as resistance, rework, or loss of confidence in the investment case.