Edward Prince Furniture Design - Creativity - How to be more creative - Assumptions

 

Creative - Assumptions

“The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new lands but in seeking with new eyes.” Marcel Proust 

The majority of your knowledge will be gathered from reading, talking to people, making inferences, and making reasonable assumptions. So how much of this do you think is really true and how much do you think you will look back in twenty years time and wonder why on earth you believed that? How much is erroneous, biased, contrived? It is an uncomfortable proposition to acknowledge that the maps which form our worldview that we have created in our minds may not be correct.

Failing to question your assumptions can be dangerous mental strategy. Although you could not live your life without making assumptions, it does pay to keep an eye on the more important assumptions you make and subject them to a test of investigation. Assumptions about the future underlie every major decision you make and can constrain your solutions. Solutions are often forced into a desired shape by manipulating underlying assumptions.

The joke about the two men and the bear illustrates the point nicely.

Bill and Ben are out hunting deep in the mountains and pitch camp for the night. In the middle of the night they were both woken up by a ten-foot grizzly bear rummaging around the camp. They both looked at each other and then at the bear, which started to move towards them. They leapt out of their sleeping bags to run away when one grabbed his shoes and started to put them on.
Bill says, “Hey, you will never out run the bear.”
To which Ben replies, “I don’t have to out run the bear, I only have to out run you.” 

At first sight the problem assumed was how to out run the bear but when the assumption was tested, the problem became how to not be eaten. 

Testing assumptions can lead to perceptual breakthroughs, shift your perspective and enable you to see problems in a new light. The result, at the least will be a new problem definition and at best a breakthrough solution.

Effective teams must share a cooperative spirit. However even in teams of two when there is too much cohesion and individuals share similar beliefs and prejudices groupthink can result. Groups which have a lot of interpersonal beliefs can hold a distorted view of a situation. One danger for teams is they become so specialised they fail to see the bigger picture. Each specialization will tend to have a particular unique perspective. 

Assumptions are self-evident truths and unquestioned givens. Problem solving requires testing assumptions. Everyday actions are all made with assumptions. Eg: Having a conversation assumes the person you’re talking to is able to listen and understand and that their nonverbal language is actually telling you what you think it is telling you. There are two types of assumption explicit (stated) and implicit (unstated). When presented with a problem study the assumptions, as they will effect how it is perceived. Often a label is attached to an object or problem and it becomes difficult to see beyond that label. Poor information will also obscure effective approaches to solving a problem. When stating or analysing a problem there is a tendency to impose too many constraints, consider various viewpoints or the interests of those affected. 

Asking what are your assumptions may not help because often the person does not know what they are assuming therefore asking questions is necessary. You identify assumptions by probing for factual information and asking questions that require justification and qualification. These questions do not to criticise but address the relevance and fairness of the information given. These are questions about opinion, beliefs and feelings. The most effective way to challenge is; ask for comparisons, cause and effect relationships, new possibilities and self-evaluation. The more questions you ask, the closer you will be to understanding the problem. Use the journalistic six Who, What, When, Where, Why, How. 

Optical illusions cause you to see one thing when something else may be present. In a similar manner we respond when confronted with different stimuli. A flower might remind one person of a loved one, another of a funeral bouquet and another a childhood moment or medical scenario. To know why they saw these they must test their assumptions. 

 

- Do you see a candlestick? - Two faces? - Or both?

- What else do you see? (rotate, cut, divide) - A whale’s tail? - A keyhole? - Two cars parked back to back, bumper to bumper?

Try to identify at least three other things

How to identify assumptions
As you think about your problem, force to the surface every given, taken for granted assumed fact about the situation you can think of. Many, if not most, assumptions do not really fit into categories like those in the checklist below. Instead, most assumptions are statements about reality that we believe to be true. Many of them are "obvious" and we normally would not think to question them. Yet that is exactly why we so often get blocked when we try to solve a difficult problem.

You might find it helpful to use a checklist of assumption areas like this:

Time	Can the solution be sped up or can more time be found somewhere?
Information	Is the information available correct? Double-check the so-called facts around the problem.
Culture	Is the solution being limited because of attitudes in the culture or practices of recent history?
Money	Are financial limits necessary? Can I find more money? I do it for less money or no money?
Co-operation	Will certain people will be in favor (or not) of the solution, support it, help implement it,
Law	Can the law/rules be changed, circumvented, broken or reinterpreted to permit the solution.
Energy	How much energy is given to a solution? Is this appropriate, will it need modifying later?
Cost/Benefit	How much is it worth to solve the problem in time, energy, money, emotion, resource.

 

Example

The following problem may give you some ideas when you are checking your assumptions. 

Q. It takes two hours for two men to dig a hole five feet deep. How deep would it have been if ten men had dug the hole for two hours?
A. The answer appears to be 25 feet deep.

This answer assumes the thinker has followed a simple mathematical formula assumed in the description. We can generate some divergent ideas about what affects the hole size which leads to different answers: 

• Deep holes require more effort, since waste soil must be lifted to the ground level.
• Deeper soil layers may be harder to dig out, or we may hit bedrock or the water table.
• Each person may become less efficient due to increased opportunity for distraction
• More men could work in shifts to dig faster for longer.
• There are more men but are there more shovels?
• The two hours dug by ten men may be under different weather conditions
• Would we rather have 5 holes each 5 feet deep?
• The two men may be an engineering crew with digging machinery.
• What if one man in each group is a manager who will not actually dig?
• The extra eight men might not be strong enough to dig, or much stronger than the first two.

The most useful ideas are outside the simple mathematics implied by the question. Divergent thinking is about reasoning that is not immediately obvious and ideas that may not be obtainable by step-by-step logic.