The next stage of the funnel is a heuristic, a rule of thumb that helps narrow the field of inquiry and work the mystery down to a manageable size.
From the businessweek.com
In all cases trust is a heuristic decision rule, allowing the human to deal with complexities that would require unrealistic effort in rational reasoning.
From the en.wikipedia.org
A policy is frequently stated in the form of a piece of advice called a heuristic, a maxim, a norm, a rule, a slogan, and so on.
From the en.wikipedia.org
The facts have been automatically extracted from Wikipedia and unified with WordNet, using a carefully designed combination of rule-based and heuristic methods described in this paper.
From the en.wikipedia.org
As an organization puts its heuristic into operation, studies it more, and thinks about it intensely, it can convert from a general rule of thumb to a fixed formula.