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Challenging assumptions

How can challenging assumptions improve people, teams, or organisational effectiveness?

AccessibleOperationalTeam2 min read

Contents

Challenging assumptions is a simple and hugely powerful creative tool based on the notion that nothing is real – we have simply assumed it to be so.

Challenging assumptions is a creative problem-solving technique that turns apparently fixed features into questions. By distinguishing genuine constraints from inherited habits, teams can redesign products, processes, systems and machines without waiting for an entirely new technology.

When to use it

Use it to redesign a process, system, service, product or machine that has become constrained by familiar practice.
Apply it when a team keeps producing variations of the same idea or says that something “has always been done this way.”
Use it early in exploration, then test resulting ideas against real physical, legal, ethical and economic constraints.

Origins

Assumption challenging has no single inventor. It developed through twentieth-century creative problem-solving practice, including Alex Osborn’s deliberate idea-generation methods, the Osborn–Parnes Creative Problem Solving process and Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking. Techniques such as reversal and provocation share the same move: expose an implicit rule, ask whether it must remain true and investigate what becomes possible if it is removed, inverted or replaced.

What it is

The method treats the current design as one set of choices rather than reality itself. Participants describe what exists, rewrite each defining feature as an assumption and generate alternatives by negating or changing it. The aim is not indiscriminate contradiction. It is to separate necessary boundaries from conventions that survive only because nobody has revisited them.

How to use it

Choose a clearly bounded challenge and describe the current arrangement without defending it. Working alone or in a small, varied group, list every step, component, rule and belief. Include statements about sequence, location, ownership, customer behaviour and technology—the “truths” on which the current design rests.

Rewrite each statement as “We assume that…” and challenge it systematically. Ask what happens if the assumption is removed, reversed, reduced, exaggerated, moved, combined or replaced. Record ideas before evaluating them. The exercise quickly reveals duplicate steps, outdated rules and activities placed in an unnecessary sequence.

For illustration, imagine the period when a telephone was understood as a heavy desktop object. Treating each familiar property as an assumption produces alternatives:

Assumption                              Alternative
It has wires.                           Make it wireless.
It has a separate base and handset.     Combine them into one unit.

Assumption                              Alternative
People are reached by dialling numbers. Add push buttons, a keypad or voice control.
It has one ringtone.                    Allow a choice of music or sounds.
It is heavy and fixed in place.         Make it portable.

Within minutes, the exercise sketches the logic of a mobile telephone. Much of the enabling technology existed long before mobile phones became common—wireless telegraphy dates to the 1870s—but the familiar configuration delayed its combination. After generating alternatives, cluster the promising ones, check them against true constraints and prototype the strongest concepts.

Final analysis.

Challenging assumptions is a fast way to simplify an existing design and create discontinuous alternatives without expecting one participant to act as a lone inventor. It works especially well as a collaborative exercise because different roles notice different hidden rules. Its playful tone can loosen habitual thinking, but the final value comes from disciplined selection and testing.

Top practical tip

Write each constraint as “We assume that…” before challenging it. This wording makes inherited choices visible without pretending that every boundary is imaginary.

Top pitfall

Do not stop at entertaining reversals. Verify legal and physical constraints, then convert the most useful alternatives into prototypes or process experiments.