What assumptions are you making?

If you’ve spent any time talking to me about business you will likely know that I have a tendency to ask a lot of questions.  Even more so when you are paying me to help you make your business more successful.

I understand it can get a little annoying having someone constantly questioning you and your thought processes, but in my role as the objective ear, the sounding board, the experienced navigator I have to fully understand what it is you are thinking if I’m to stand any chance of helping you.

And in reality you telling me the answer to a question isn’t actually the end goal.  The actual bit that helps is you digging into your thought processes and hopefully unearthing any assumptions that might be hiding there.

I’ve worked with a lot of businesses over the years, some of them were my own, and many others in my role as Navigator.  It is always the assumptions that you didn’t know about, that catch you out and cause problems.  Sometimes enough of a problem to kill the business dead.

Please don’t think I am claiming to be some kind of perfect super-human that never makes assumptions, that is far from the truth.  We all make assumptions all the time, it is part of the human condition, and is how we are programmed to work.

Assumptions are a type of heuristic, a mental shortcut we all take to enable ourselves to solve problems and learn new concepts when we encounter new and unusual situations.  They can be extremely helpful.

But they can also be extremely damaging.  Take anchoring for example.

Anchoring is a form of heuristic that we all fall victim to from time to time.  In essence it is the tendency to be more heavily influenced by information we come across first. This can lead us to be less influenced by other factors, and can cause us to make poor choices.

For example when you first came up with the idea of your business you did some research into the idea.  Into the problem you were solving and other possible solutions.

You did do this right?

That research likely gave you a nice snapshot of the world into which you decided to launch your business. It helped you understand whether what you were looking to offer was going to be a success, or not.

In some ways it was the ultimate foundation of the business itself.

Have you revisited it?

If you have then well done, you may well be ahead of the game, but perhaps your attempts to check that the market is still as receptive as you initially thought have been damaged by anchoring.  It’s possible that the situation has changed, and if you were to start from scratch right now you’d do things differently, but because of our tendency to fall victim to anchoring you aren’t giving the new information as much credence as the old.

Perhaps you are searching for investment into a business that is not as viable as you originally thought.

You can see straight away that anchoring could have the potential to cause serious damage to your business if you don’t spot it and unpack it.

But also you can see why it might not be possible for you to do that yourself without the addition of an objective person who doesn’t have your anchoring bias.

Assumptions like this can be found everywhere. We judge people based on other people we already know who are similar.

We judge the accuracy of facts based on how attractive we find the person presenting them.

We judge the chances of success based on how positive or negative our mental state is when we have to make the decision.

So it may be that you have spoken to someone you know who managed to get funding very easily for their business, and so you are assuming that you will also manage to secure the money you need quickly.

It may be that in a former business you were left in the lurch by a developer who didn’t do what they were paid to do and so you have a more negative view of developers than is actually fair.

It may simply be that you are assuming that your opinion is representative of everyone else’s.

In my experience that is rarely the case.

The fact is that we all make assumptions pretty much all of the time, and that while some of your assumptions are going to be good and helpful it is likely you've made some assumptions that can be damaging. It’s my job to help you identify what these may be.

However it is rarely as simple as me spotting your assumptions and pointing them out to you.  I am just as fallible as the next person.  I’ll likely spot a few, after all the chances of us thinking exactly the same way is very slim indeed (Isn’t that kinda the whole point? - Ed), but what I can do is help you work through the process of uncovering them.

Sometimes all it takes is awareness, but often we need to be prompted. There are several tools designed to help us be more systematic about finding & evaluating our assumptions. They might prompt us to get out into the world and speak to people. For example if we have assumed that customers will value a specific feature of our product, we might be well advised to talk to potential customers and validate this. A great starting point is Assumption Mapping by David Bland.

Find out what the problems they actually face are, which ones annoy them the most, what sort of solutions might work for them, and even what sort of price point they might be willing to pay to access that solution.

You might find out that the problem is worse than you assumed.  That the market is bigger than you thought, and that people are simply desperate for the solution you are creating.

After all, assumptions work both ways.

So, do you know what assumptions you are making in your business? Are you comfortable with them?