The Hidden Assumptions Costing You Every Day

Every organization runs on assumptions. Most of them were never written down. Many were never even spoken aloud. They just accumulated — layer by layer — until they became the invisible architecture of how decisions get made.

The problem isn't that assumptions exist. The problem is that nobody is looking at them.

Assumptions don't announce themselves. They show up as "the way we do things," as "everyone knows that," as the premise buried three levels deep in a strategy deck that nobody questions because questioning it would mean questioning everything built on top of it.

Here are a few I've encountered in real organizations:

• "Our customers won't pay more than X." (Last tested: 2017.)
• "That department handles that." (The department was restructured two years ago.)
• "We can't compete with them on price." (Nobody has checked their pricing in 18 months.)

Each of these sounds reasonable. Each of them was wrong. And each of them was costing the organization real money, real time, or real opportunity.

There's a cognitive reason we stop questioning assumptions: it's expensive. Every assumption we hold in place is one fewer thing we have to think about. The brain is efficient. It builds shortcuts. It files things under "settled."

The trouble is that the world doesn't stay settled. Markets shift. Competitors move. Customer needs evolve. And the assumptions that were accurate three years ago become the invisible walls of a box you don't even know you're in.

Surfacing assumptions isn't a one-time audit. It's a practice — a habit of asking a specific kind of question at a specific kind of moment.

The moment is: whenever a decision feels obvious.

Obvious decisions are the ones most likely to be resting on an unexamined assumption. The feeling of obviousness is the signal, not the answer.

The question is: What would have to be true for this to be the right call?

Work backwards from the decision. List the conditions that would make it correct. Then ask, for each one: do we actually know this is true, or are we assuming it?

You'll be surprised how often the answer is the latter.

Individual assumption-hunting is useful. Collective assumption-hunting is transformative.

The most effective teams I've worked with have a simple norm: when someone proposes a course of action, someone else is expected to ask "what are we assuming here?" It's not adversarial. It's not a challenge to the person. It's a challenge to the idea — and it's welcomed, because everyone has seen what happens when assumptions go unexamined.

Building this norm takes time. It takes psychological safety. And it takes leaders who model the behavior — who ask the question about their own proposals before anyone else has to.

You don't need to audit your entire strategy this week. Start with one decision you're about to make. Before you make it, ask: what am I assuming? Write the assumptions down. Check one of them.

That's it. That's the practice.

The rocks are everywhere. You just have to start looking under them.