Why You Need To Annihilate Your Assumptions

One of the worst things you can do in business, particularly when it comes to solving a problem, is to bring all your assumptions to the table.

It's a human thing to operate based on assumption. What we're getting at is that it's not always an effective way to operate.

In a business situation, when an operational challenge comes up and it's the first time we've seen it, relying on assumptions can be useful - they might save you a lot of time and a lot of pain. Gut feeling, instinct, quick decisions - they all have major value.

However, if a challenge comes up repeatedly, twice, three times etc, then you've already used your assumption capital. You know now that your assumptions did not serve you in that situation. So second or the third time and possibly more iterations after that, then the assumptions haven't served you in that situation. At that point, as much as it is humanly possible to do so, you need to eliminate (or annihilate, who doesn't love a bit of alliteration), those assumptions and actually wipe the floor of all of the things that we have seen before that we think are happening, and really do a deep dive into what's going on.

Ask questions. Ask questions again, and again. Never be in acceptance of the first, second or even third round of questions, because if you haven't managed to solve the problem (and you know you’re experienced, you've been doing this stuff for a while), there's something that you are not seeing that is obvious to somebody who kind of thinks in a slightly weirder way. There's something that you're not seeing.