Definition
The skeleton of a consulting project: breaking an ambition into 'conditions that must hold', with each condition specifying what evidence verifies it and where the evidence comes from. Not DBS textbook content.
In detail
The hypothesis tree is a common practice in strategy consulting, not a tool from DBS textbooks. It breaks down ambitions like '12–15% share' into a tree of necessary conditions, with each branch carrying an evidence plan and evidence status; gate reviews go through each branch, pruning falsified ones. It is a document (slides or spreadsheet), appearing in the system as action items and related materials, not a tool.
Example in practice
Two weeks before the first gate, "assumption tree review," the team breaks each of the three ambitions into four or five necessary conditions, each with its data source. On review day, the sponsor sees that both pieces of evidence for the "30% local value-add" branch are still assumptions and decides to request the first five items of the data list before discussing the rest.