Differential Diagnosis

Differential diagnosis is the medical and diagnostic-reasoning practice of generating multiple hypotheses — typically covering a named set of categories such as infectious, traumatic, structural, systemic, psychological — for an observed condition and testing each against the available evidence. The term originated in clinical medicine and was documented in Howard Barrows and Paul Feltovich's work on the clinical reasoning process. The workshop adaptation is Hypothesis Generation's Structured-Differential variation, which applies the category-coverage discipline to non-medical domains — diagnosing a workshop outcome, a client engagement, a cohort dynamic. The underlying principle transfers directly: force category coverage before commitment to avoid the diagnostic error of missing a whole class of possible explanations.