What is a Prompt List (PESTLE, TECOP, VUCA)?
A prompt list is a predetermined set of risk categories used to systematically jog identification — walk each prompt and ask "what risks live here?" The famous ones: PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental), TECOP (technical, environmental, commercial, operational, political), and VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) for framing overall project risk.
Its job is beating availability bias: brainstorms surface the risks people recently experienced; prompt lists force the categories nobody's been burned by lately.
Worked example
A desalination project's risk workshop free-associates forty risks — nearly all technical, because the room is engineers. The facilitator then walks TECOP: "commercial" surfaces currency exposure on the membrane contract; "political" surfaces a water-pricing referendum nobody had mentioned. The two biggest risks of the eventual project came from the prompts, not the brainstorm — which is the standard result.