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Dr. Chui Chui Tan's four-bucket framework

Monday, March 31st, 2025 at 12:00 PM international business strategic planning business expansion product development market entry customer understanding how this works show dr. chui chui tan cultural insights knowledge management business strategy research framework global growth market research cross-cultural research four-bucket exercise

In today's global marketplace, understanding new markets and customers is essential for business growth. The four-bucket exercise, developed by cultural strategist Dr. Chui Chui Tan, offers a structured approach to organizing knowledge and identifying gaps when entering new markets or improving existing products.

What is the four-bucket exercise?

The four-bucket exercise is a canvas designed to consolidate and clarify a business's understanding of a market by categorizing knowledge into four distinct areas:

  • Known facts: Evidence-based truths supported by concrete data
  • Strong hypothesis: Assertions backed by data that require further validation
  • Weak hypothesis: Assumptions with minimal supporting evidence
  • Unknowns: Both known gaps and blind spots in knowledge that need exploration

What makes this exercise powerful is how it separates certainty from uncertainty, creating a foundation for more actionable strategies. When teams collaborate to sort their collective knowledge into these buckets, they gain clarity about what they genuinely know versus what they merely think they know.

Why it works

Dr. Tan emphasizes rigor when implementing this exercise, particularly with the "known facts" bucket. During the last episode of the How This Works show, she recounted how team members often confidently place items in this category, only to reconsider when asked for supporting evidence. This moment of truth ensures strategic decisions rest on verified information rather than comfortable assumptions.

The framework can even be applied when working with large language models like Claude or ChatGPT. Just as you would challenge team members' assumptions, you can use this framework to evaluate an LLM's outputs — sorting them into verifiable facts, strong hypotheses worth exploring, weak assumptions needing scrutiny, or areas where more knowledge is needed.

From insights to strategy

By highlighting critical knowledge gaps, the four-bucket exercise helps organizations focus limited resources where they'll deliver the greatest value. The result transforms scattered insights into a cohesive foundation for strategy development and reveals exactly what the team needs to learn next — whether through traditional research, stakeholder interviews, or thoughtfully querying AI systems.

Want to try this powerful exercise yourself? You can download a PDF version of Chui Chui's four-bucket exercise: https://bit.ly/4hWVZHF

For more context, listen to episode 34 of the How This Works show, where we discuss this framework with Dr. Chui Chui Tan (discussion begins around 21 minutes). This exercise was developed by Dr. Tan and is featured in Chapter 4 of her book "Research for Global Growth."