What's That About?
By Les Mottosky
Our brains are ridonkulously hungry. It's speculated by neuroscience that our brain can gobble-up more than 20% of our daily calories. That's a wildly disproportionate amount of energy for an organ – critical as it is – of only three pounds. For that reason the brain is equipped with a strong efficiency-bias. Two of the ways it expresses that bias is through the cognitive shortcuts of conclusion and assumption. These are the fuels for auto-pilot.
Both are connected. Both are dangerous. Both require awareness and discernment.
A conclusion is the brain saying, 'I've seen enough. I know what this means'. An assumption goes one step further: 'I've seen something like this before, so I know what will happen next'.
Useful? Yup. We couldn't function without some version of either. The problem begins when this reliance on efficiency gets confused for certainty.
We conclude that someone is angry because they didn't respond to our message. We assume they're angry because they've been distant lately. We conclude that an idea won't work because we've tried something similar before. We assume the market isn't ready because nobody bought it last time.
And bada-boom, a possibility becomes a fact.
The danger isn't necessarily that our conclusions are wrong. It's that once we've concluded something, we tend to stop thinking and start believing. Meaning, the brain gets to conserve energy because: 'this case is closed'.
Assumptions are even more insidious. They allow us to make decisions about things we haven't actually looked at. They turn gaps in knowledge into invisible certainty. Worse, because we often don't recognize an assumption as an assumption, we can defend it with the conviction normally reserved for evidence.
This is huge in a rattling world changing faster than our experience can keep up.
Yesterday's experience is useful. But it can become today's blind spot. What worked before may no longer work. What failed before may now be exactly what is needed. The person we think we know may be changing. The customer we think we understand may have different needs. The future rarely feels obliged to behave like the past.
So perhaps the discipline isn't to avoid conclusions and assumptions. That's impossible.
It's to catch ourselves making them.
Replace 'I know' with 'I think'.
Replace 'that's how it is' with 'that's how it occurs'.
And most effectively, make a habit of asking yourself the costliest question a hungry brain can ask:
What if I'm wrong?
*A special note for Senior Management Teams:
Once you've brainstormed a strategy, it's valuable to hold a conversation about what assumptions might be embedded in that thinking. The benefit is two fold. It's a convo that requires remarkable candor and trust. The best way to generate trust, is to offer it first. As a leader, begin the debate; throw down what you see as potential assumptions and listen to the feedback. That vulnerability you demonstrate signals to others that their critical ideas and insights are welcome. Even – maybe especially – when enthusiasm is high.
TAGS: #What's That About?
Les Mottosky
Writes to expand the capacity of the human behind the career.
Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.
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