Assuming – a dangerous business behavior.
As business people we make assumptions every day. We assume when Word runs a spell check, it will catch the misspellings. We assume when our sales staff tells us we are losing to the competition because our products or services are priced too high – they are correct. We assume when we tell our team what we need them to do, they will do it.
Assumptions are decision-making short cuts. We often see this as an over-reliance on experiential based decisions. The more experience we have, the faster we can reach conclusions and make a decision. Make sense? Sure, unless the assumptions are based on an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the facts. And when this happens what we find is we’ve abdicated responsibility for knowing and understanding the facts. The more experience we have, the more we tend to abdicate.
Let’s go back to the spell check example. When we were writing the paragraph above, we initially wrote “And hen this happens…” What we meant to write was “And when this happens…” Spell check didn’t catch this because there wasn’t a misspelling. If we didn’t proof read, you would now be wondering what hens have to do with our message. Our experience tells us that spell check looks for and finds misspelled words. True–it does. True also is what it doesn’t do – look for the more subtle issue of context. In other words, it only works unless it doesn’t!
While the spell check example may be amusing, making quick assumptions based on little or no facts in our business is anything but amusing. We have seen a business person muse about the lack of response from a prospect to a note sent three weeks after the initially meeting with the prospect. Their conclusion (read: assumption) was that the prospect was not interested in their product. The facts are different. The prospect concluded after not seeing a follow-up until three weeks after the initial meeting that the seller was not interested in (did not care about) their business. How do we know? We asked?
Assuming is dangerous, and we offer the following thoughts for your consideration:
- Before making an assumption ask yourself – what’s the evidence?
- If you have no current evidence and you still believe there is an important issue to address – go out and find the evidence and begin by asking
- When you find it, base your decision on the facts
- If you can’t find it – accept the fact that there is no issue and move on
Time is precious, as is our mental health. Don’t waste it addressing or worrying the wrong issue or worse yet, no issue at all.
Copyright 2010 Kubica and LaForest
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