Note from the Editor
The assumptions that can hold us back come in different forms. The types of assumptions that we find depend on how we look for them.
—Ellen
Four Ways to Question Assumptions
You may have come across advice (whether from us or elsewhere) that if you are struggling to come up with a solution to a difficult problem, it’s a good idea to question your assumptions. This is because what we perceive to be possible or to be a problem is a function not only of reality, but of our perception of reality, and the reality that we perceive is the selective reality that we form from the data available to us—whether that data is accurate or inaccurate, complete or incomplete, salient or irrelevant.
The advice typically says to ask yourself something like,
“What assumptions am I making that I am not aware of making?”
“What assumptions have I not yet challenged?”
Here are four ways to approach answering this kind of question in order to uncover some of the assumptions that may be holding you back. Each approach may lead to a different kind of answer.
Four Ways to Question Your Assumptions
First way: Ask yourself one of these questions about a problem you have, or a situation you find yourself in. Write down any assumptions that you were not aware of making that you can identify. See how many assumptions you’ve found that you were not aware you were making.
Second way: Instead of just thinking of assumptions you are making, try to go beyond what you can first think of by challenging yourself to write down all the assumptions you can think of, and then write down 10 more (sort of the way we talk about in our article in which we discuss using the act of writing to generate new ideas).
Third way: Instead of starting by asking what assumptions you are making, start by writing down what the situation is, as objectively and factually as you can. Capture different dimensions of the situation. Don’t distinguish between things that are assumptions and things that are not.
Then read through your answer, and for each part of the situation you’ve noted, see if you can separate out the facts from the assumptions that you have been making that you had not been aware of making.
Fourth way: Instead of asking yourself what assumptions you have been making that you’re not aware you’ve making, describe the situation you are thinking about to a friend. Again, try to be objective and to talk about different dimensions of the situation. See if they can point out any assumptions that you were not aware you were making about the situation.
Once you’ve looked for your assumptions in the way that makes the most sense to you, ask yourself:
What kinds of things let you know what was assumption and what was fact?
What “facts” ended up being false?
Why did they seem like “facts” even though they weren’t?
The Assumptions That We Can Find When We Look:
If you answered the questions using the first or second ways, I suspect that the assumptions you identified are (at least mostly) things you realized you haven’t actually given much thought to.
When we question our assumptions, we are able to see which “facts” we are not actually sure of: anything we’ve been taking as a given that we realize we don’t actually know. We’re shining a light on how much thought we have or haven’t put into building these statements we are taking to be knowledge, or maybe how much evidence we have informing these claims.
This is something we know to be useful to do when we are deciding how to approach something. We can create a list of working assumptions, which helps us identify what we are not sure of, and later reminds us that the knowledge we base on these assumptions shouldn’t be taken as truth.
In undertaking and presenting scientific research we explicitly state the known assumptions on which our research is based. In research, it’s easy for this attitude to become the norm: we consider everything an assumption and make no definite statements.
When we separate assumptions from facts in this kind of process, we are treating assumptions like they are things that we can identify just by asking what they are. We are also working with the idea that we can become aware of things of which we are not aware by asking ourselves what we are unaware of.
It seems like the difference between assumption and truth is that truths are supported by more solid evidence we have gathered, while assumptions indicate times that we’ve jumped to a conclusion often without realizing it. We’re looking for evidence of two different processes—or for different kinds of “knowledge” that have the markers of “fact” and “assumption” that will indicate to us which is which.
Hidden Assumptions
If you answered using the third or fourth approach, I think it is likely that more of the assumptions you identified look like this:
Something you were not aware you had less information about than the other “facts” of the situation, and that you didn’t realize could be seen another way. It looks identical to all the other “factual statements”, only now you realize it cannot be a fact since there is an alternative.
This can be seen as a different type of assumption from the ones we can recognize when we sort through the things we are more or less certain of, as we do when we search for assumptions directly.
This type of assumption suggests that the difference between “knowledge” and “assumption” is not the difference between two different things, two different entities. And it’s not the difference between two different kinds of thought, forms of thought, or modes of thinking.
Rather, the difference is in the contexts surrounding statements that we consider truthful or that we consider to be assumptions.
We are able to categorize something as “assumption” only when we are able to see an alternative, or the possibility of an alternative.
The existence of an “assumption,” our ability to label something as an “assumption,” is a function of, and always predicated on, a comparison between our way of looking at something, and information that reveals other ways of looking at it, particularly ways that lead to other conclusions.
The way to create insights about these assumptions on purpose involves first finding alternatives, and only then realizing that an assumption has kept us from seeing something that way until now. We can’t go straight to what is an assumption – we must go through a new perspective of the situation.
Methods three and four for looking for assumptions create more space for alternative views by exposing to us to different perspectives.
Answering the question the third way creates this space because by challenging ourselves to get into more detail about the situation without first sorting out what we are assuming and not assuming, we create a new view of the situation already. This new view enables us to see other avenues for action and other questions we can ask ourselves.
At a more concrete level of detail, there are far more opportunities for questioning what we do and do not know. At the abstract level, as we have discussed in a number of our previous articles here in Change, the possibilities have already been narrowed down before we start.
Another way to create alternatives to our “facts” using the third way could be to ask, “what are the alternatives?” for each presumed fact, rather than trying to ask yourself, “what are my assumptions?”
When looking for assumptions using the fourth way, the perspective of another person will naturally include alternative views of things we had been seeing only one way. This will create the dissonance between how we see things and what we could see that is required to distinguish an “assumption” from “the way things are.”
This story from my last article on using problems as a creative tool also illustrates how a different perspective can push us to question assumptions we haven’t even thought to question on our own:
A story is told of a trainee of Jay Haley’s who was badly stuck in a family therapy case. Haley asked the trainee what the problem was, and was told “the symbiotic relationship between mother and daughter.” Haley replied, “I would never let that be the problem.”[1]
The trainee had assumed that she was struggling to find an answer because she hadn’t found or considered all the alternative approaches to the problem, but the assumption that changed her approach the most when questioned was that pursuing the problem was productive at all.
What Other Kinds of Assumptions Do We Make?
These are four approaches to questioning our assumptions based on two ways of categorizing them. I assume there are more useful ways of thinking about assumptions, and more creative ways of finding them.
© Copyright 2022 Ellen Arkfeld
The moral right of the author has been asserted
[1] O’Hanlon and Wilk, Shifting Contexts, New York: Guilford Press, 1987, p. 79