Are Assumptions Crippling Your Success?

Seeing General Motors back in the news - with yet more strife between workers and management - reminded me of a classic case study into the risks of hidden assumptions.

In the early 70s, Peter O’Toole (professor of management at the University of Southern California) studied GM’s management and was able to identify a number of hidden assumptions that were crippling GM’s success. While these assumptions are outdated - although, in hindsight, still amusing - they serve as a reminder that hidden assumptions can be accidents waiting to happen. My two favorites are:

• Energy will always be cheap and abundant.
• The US car market is isolated from the rest of the world. Foreign competition will never gain more than 15% of the domestic market.

As we peer through the retrospectoscope and smugly ask: What were they thinking? It’s worth pausing to consider if we’re operating under any potentially catastrophic hidden assumptions.

The Role Of Assumptions
Each time you face a situation that appears similar to something you’ve encountered before, you subconsciously consult a list of assumptions. Your ability to make these assumptions is crucial. For example, when you ascend a flight of stairs you assume that the next step will hold you just like the last one did, and it’s jolly lucky that you do! Can you imagine how tiresome life would be if you had to test every aspect of your circumstances, every time?

This "built in" approach is fine until you come across a challenge. Then your natural tendency to make snap judgments, based on your assumptions, doesn’t serve you as well. This is because, with every assumption you make, you become progressively less likely to respond to a challenging situation in an imaginative way. Therefore, one way to approach your problems more creatively is to dump an assumption.

Extreme Essay
This Perspective Power strategy will enable you to pinpoint your unconscious assumptions. Anybody embarking on a new enterprise should write an essay called: "The reasons why my [enter project here] will be a total unmitigated disaster!" After arguing passionately for your project’s limitations, scan your writing for absolute words like always, never, shouldn’t and don’t. The sentences that contain these words reveal your assumptions.

For example, one possible sentence might be: "In order to make good progress with this project we shouldn’t spend more than a week collecting feedback from our customers." Focusing on this one sentence, in isolation, exposes the assumption that "the opinions of our customers won’t reveal much valuable information or be a good use of our time".

After identifying each assumption, evaluate whether you have any objective evidence that it is accurate. If you don’t, modify this assumption to get a fresh perspective that drives more effective action. Deliberately taking an extremely skewed viewpoint, and then isolating and reviewing each of your assumptions, is an effective way of seeing things differently. Try it for yourself and see what presuppositions are shaping your viewpoint and limiting your success.

I would love to hear your feedback,

Steve