Impulse

I didn’t really know much about Buckminster Fuller until a recent New Yorker arti­cle edu­cated me.  The inven­tor of the geo­desic dome & mod­u­lar hous­ing was a pretty wacky guy.  Though nearly all of his ideas flopped, he had some good ideas in his approach.  My favorite involves cling­ing to a piano cover as a life preserver:

‘

‘If you are in a ship­wreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a for­tu­itous life pre­server,’ Fuller once wrote. ‘But this is not to say that the best way to design a life pre­server is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are cling­ing to a great many piano tops in accept­ing yesterday’s for­tu­itous contrivings.’

[from the New Yorker arti­cle by Elizabeth Kolbert]

Often, the biggest hur­dle in solv­ing a prob­lem is find­ing the out­dated or invalid assump­tions you’re habit­u­ally mak­ing.  These assump­tions are the piano tops in our think­ing.  Alaska Airlines pro­vides a great exam­ple of how get­ting rid of an assump­tion allowed them to redesign the check-in process to save $8 mil­lion a year.  (Documented in Hustle & Flow at fastcompany.com; via Signal vs Noise):

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The new design will cre­ate sig­nif­i­cant cost sav­ings. Seventy-three per­cent of Alaska’s Anchorage pas­sen­gers now check in using kiosks or the Web, com­pared with just 50% across the air­line industry.

I won­der how many old-school assump­tions the rest of the air­lines are mak­ing.  Perhaps if they found them, bank­ruptcy wouldn’t be the indus­try norm.  It also makes me think of Amory Lovins’ TED talk on end­ing US depen­dence on for­eign oil (his book describes his plan in detail).  One of the basic assump­tions he breaks is that end­ing the oil depen­dency is a costly, com­plex prob­lem.  He then goes on to show that the solu­tion is not com­plex and pays for itself as it’s imple­mented.  How many of our world’s most press­ing prob­lems are blocked on the assump­tion that solu­tions are com­plex and costly? 

It’s not just a busi­ness prob­lem — this hap­pens every­where.  Scientific dis­cov­er­ies get hid­den or con­fused by uncon­scious assump­tions in inter­pret­ing data.  Writers get stuck resolv­ing their plot lines.  The “ah ha!” moment usu­ally comes when you dis­cover the unnec­es­sary assump­tion you’ve been mak­ing.  Suddenly your think­ing is clear and a solu­tion seems almost obvi­ous (though often feels unconventional).

Another exam­ple: In Million Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell points out that pub­lic pol­icy on home­less­ness is based on the assump­tion that home­less­ness fol­lows a Gaussian bell curve — that the major­ity of home­less peo­ple were per­ma­nently so.  He shows that home­less­ness fol­lows more of a power-law curve — that most home­less peo­ple are only in that sit­u­a­tion for a few months, then never again.  Only a few home­less peo­ple are reg­u­larly on the streets.  If you change the assump­tion, thus the pol­icy, you could save gov­ern­ments mil­lions and bet­ter serve both the tem­porar­ily and per­ma­nently homeless.

All this reminds me of my favorite scene from The Contender.  It’s not actu­ally in the movie, but in the deleted scenes sec­tion of the DVD.  While I agree it was super­flu­ous to the movie, it is a gem of a scene.  In it, the White House Press Secretary and Chief of Staff are sit­ting in the oval office, exhausted by the incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult process of con­firm­ing a new Vice President (expertly played by Joan Allen).  The President (Jeff Bridges) comes in, sits down and says,

‘

“You got five apes in a cage. You got a banana hang­ing by a string in the mid­dle of the cage. You got some stairs going to the banana. Now, pretty soon, one of those apes is gonna go for the banana. As soon as he hits the stairs, you take a hose and you spray all five apes with freez­ing cold water for five minutes.

Now, some time passes, and pretty soon another one of the apes is going to make the same attempt with the same result: all five apes get sprayed with the cold water.

Now you turn off the cold water. You never use it again. One of the apes is going to go for the banana. He hits the stairs. The other four apes pounce on him, and beat the shit out of him. OK. Understandable.

Now you replace one of those orig­i­nal apes with a new ape. After a while, that new ape, he’s going to spy that banana, and when he goes for the stairs, the other four apes are going to jump on him and beat the shit out of him. Right?

Now time passes. You replace another one of the orig­i­nal apes with a new ape. That new ape is going to go for the banana. The other four apes are going to beat the shit out of him — includ­ing the first new ape, who as no idea why he’s enthu­si­as­ti­cally beat­ing the shit out of this poor guy, nor why he, him­self, had the shit beat out of him. Ok?

Now, you keep replac­ing the orig­i­nal apes with new apes until finally, you’ve got a cage filled with five apes who have never had the freez­ing cold water sprayed on them, and nev­er­the­less, not one of the apes will ever attempt to climb those stairs again.

Why not?

Because, that’s the way it’s always been done around here.” 

By the end, the apes oper­ate under the assump­tion that reach­ing for the banana is bad, and must be pun­ished.  But, that assump­tion is out­dated; made, in fact, before any of them came to the cage.  In real­ity, since we’ve shut off the water, there’s noth­ing other than that assump­tion that pre­vents any ape from get­ting the banana.  Just like peo­ple who clung to piano tops don’t see the life preservers. 

It’s so easy to be ruled by assump­tions you’re not aware of.  I think it’s help­ful to break these assump­tions when­ever possible. 

Here’s mine for the day: that the only way for me to be pro­duc­tive on a project is to spend all day work­ing on it (this assump­tion ignores the evi­dence that I’ll pro­cras­ti­nate end­lessly, search­ing for a huge block of time to work).   To break it, I’ve spent no more than 1 hour on any given project.  As a result, I’ve got­ten a bunch done.  It feels good.

What uncon­scious assump­tions are you mak­ing?  Go find one today and break it.