Assumed Innocent
Hidden and unexamined assumptions can ruin your day
The evolution of the modern skyscraper was facilitated in large part by the development of the elevator. But if you have ever worked in a modern high-rise, you know that the invention of the elevator was at best a dubious blessing. Nothing can ruin a promising day faster than cooling your heels in some cavernous lobby, hoping to squeeze into a spot on the next stuffy, overcrowded elevator.
So you can imagine the chagrin a group of real estate developers felt when shortly after a large-scale high-rise project was completed, the tenants started pounding on their door, complaining about the slow elevators. The developers called in their engineers, whose recommended solution was to upgrade the elevator system with more efficient machinery, at a price tag of some $300,000. The developers decided there had to be a better, and cheaper, answer. So they called in psychologist and business consultant Edward de Bono.
De Bono’s solution was as simple as it was elegant. He suggested that the developers install floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the walls between the elevators. The mirrors were installed — at a fraction of the cost of upgrading the machinery — and the complaints stopped. Distracted by their own reflections, riders no longer seemed to care about the time they spent waiting for the elevators to arrive.
This story is in fact apocryphal, but it endures as an urban legend because it illustrates an important point. The assumptions we make — in this case, the engineers’ assumption that an ideal solution had to be mechanical in nature — are the natural enemies of creative thought. They short-circuit our imaginations and lead us inevitably to think in terms of common solutions when faced with uncommon challenges.
“It’s not just that people are making decisions based upon assumptions that they’re not even conscious of, but they’re not necessarily correct assumptions,” observes Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California. “It would be helpful if people would question their assumptions and spend more time learning about how things really are, as opposed to making assumptions and going off without testing them.”
The best way to avoid making hidden or unwarranted assumptions is to ask a simple one-word question: “Why?” If you answer this question honestly, you will have taken a big step toward detecting the potential flaws in your logic.
To make the process easier, Joel Brandon, co-author with Dan Morris of Just Don’t Do It: Challenging Assumptions in Business (McGraw-Hill, 1997), recommends creating a simple diagram, even if it’s just a quick sketch.
“If you look at a process and map it in any way,” he explains, “your assumptions will surface pretty quickly because you have a step-by-step sequence of how something is done. Every time you look at one of those steps you say, ‘Why am I doing this?’ [Too often] we find that people are making assumptions about what their managers want. These assumptions are almost never true.”
When examining our underlying assumptions, then, it is important to ask questions of people who are actually familiar with the process being examined. “[Managers] should gather the data directly,” cautions Brandon. “That’s an especially important thing to do in business today because we’re experiencing more of this silo effect, where the parts of a business don’t talk to each other.”
Assumptions are not inherently bad, however. Experience has taught us, for example, that when we approach a green light, it is safe to drive through the intersection. If we didn’t make that assumption, traffic would grind to a standstill. Averting gridlock, while at the same time steering clear of unwarranted assumptions, ultimately requires that we approach our lives with a heightened sense of awareness.
Whether you’re tackling a difficult problem or threading your way through rush hour traffic in an unfamiliar city, it always pays to identify and examine your assumptions. It might well save you and your organization a bundle in unnecessary expenditures. And who knows? It might even save your life.
— Dayton Fandray
(Read@Work)
Think Before You Act
“Thinking is hard work, so people don’t do it,” laments Jeffrey Pfeffer. “It’s easier to do what some other people do, or do what you’ve always done, or do what everybody tells you to do.” Pfeffer argues his case persuasively in his latest book, What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management (Harvard Business School Press, 2007). One of the key problems Pfeffer addresses in the book is our tendency to base too many decisions on hidden or unwarranted assumptions.
Luda Kopeikina’s The Right Decision Every Time (Prentice Hall, 2005) provides a smart, structured approach to decision making. The author notes that “one of the major traps in decision making is wrong or biased assumptions” and goes on to set out a number of useful strategies to avoid these traps.
Even if the story of Edward de Bono and the elevators is little more than an urban legend, the myth endures because it is such an apt illustration of de Bono’s innovative approach to problem solving. De Bono’s book Lateral Thinking (Harper Paperbacks, 1970) is a thought-provoking introduction to his methods.
— D.F.
