Dangers and opportunities of assumptions

By Kim Jong-nam

Assumptions have a bad reputation. We tend to think that they can impede our dealings with people or even with organizational phenomena, because they might blind us to what's really going on. However, we talk less about how ― despite their drawbacks ― they are necessary to leading an organization effectively: it is impossible to navigate the world without assumptions.

Otherwise, leaders would be forever double-checking every single minor detail. Indeed, when assumptions in an organization become widespread enough, they get a different name: many experts say that the essence of an organizational culture consists of the underlying assumptions that exist deep in an organization. These underlying assumptions cause people to behave in a certain way and form their emotions and attitudes. Therefore, in order for leaders to truly understand their organizations, they need to know not only what kind of phenomena happen there, but also what assumptions cause these phenomena to happen.

A few years ago, when I conducted a consulting project to diagnose one organization's culture, the general manager of the company asked me whether we could go through a hypothesis verification process. I didn't know exactly what he meant, so I asked him. He told me he had at least 30 hypotheses about his organization that he wanted to test. He even told me he would be willing to pay more for the extra time and personnel. Interested, I gladly agreed: this chance would be an opportunity to see how close a leader's underlying assumptions were to the organization's true nature. The process took several days. The general manager asked for updates several times and seemed more interested in these results than in the actual diagnosis results.

When the mid-term report was due, I made a presentation about what my company had found so far regarding their organizational culture and what some next steps could be. When I was finished, the general manager objected, saying that I had not discussed his hypotheses.

I explained that I had, and that what we had found painted a more complex picture. There was strong enough evidence for some of his hypotheses, while evidence for the others was mixed or insufficient. The general manager was surprised and argued that my conclusions did not support what he had predicted. "How is this possible?" he asked me. I told him that either I had made an error in the verification process or his initial assumptions were mistaken. The general manager insisted that his assumptions were correct because he had been speaking with many of his employees and there was a general consensus (e.g., many employees agreed that the leadership was weak). Indeed, he was so certain about his assumptions that he asked me to do a further hypothesis verification process. It was at this moment that I realized his true intentions. Far from genuinely wanting to learn if and how he was mistaken about his organization, he actually just wanted to be proven right by my data. Even leaders who are aware that they are making assumptions about their organization can let these assumptions blind them.

The real problem lies not in not knowing what kind of phenomena happen but in not understanding or not being interested in understanding what causes these phenomena to happen. Many organizations fail in their organizational culture management largely because of this problem. However, they are very quick in implementing change measures. Doing such is the same as taking medicine without knowing the real cause of the disease. Given this situation, there are two things that leaders need to take note of to be effective.

First, collective assumptions are made not only by employees but also by managers themselves. Listening to employees is great leadership behavior, but it is not enough, because what seems like a consensus truth may still not be the full picture or may not be true in the correct comparative context. If leaders give credence to the assumptions they hear without undergoing a true verification process, they will begin contributing to the formation of even stronger collective assumptions. I'll not talk further about what consequences doing that will have in making decisions. Just don't forget that employees are preternaturally gifted in learning leaders' assumptions and behaving reactively to them.

Second, the causes of collective organizational assumptions are highly varied. If an organization holds an assumption that their leadership is very weak, we should not forget that there are a lot of factors that could make this assumption seem true: how many people were asked about the leadership, what attributes of leadership were asked about, and whether leadership was compared to other organizational elements, for example. A common opinion like "the leadership is weak" may not actually stand up to scrutiny when placed in a larger context and measured relative to other factors (weak compared to what?).

Many organizations fail in managing their organizational culture change not because they don't hold corporate events, but because they don't understand their underlying assumptions or are not passionate about dealing with them. Assumptions are unavoidable; what's more important is how you handle them.

Kim Jong-nam is the founding CEO of META (www.imeta.co.kr) and a global organizational development consultant who works both virtually and in person.

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