Givens and Assumptions

Working on a brainstorm recently with a client, we asked the question "What would happen to our industry if our givens became assumptions and our assumptions became givens?" For example, what would happen if we took for granted that each business or homeowner would generate their own electricity rather than purchase it from a utility? Suppose we went back to the past and placed a windmill or some other generation device at each home or place of business. Now, what changes about the business landscape?

Well, for one, the people who own the transmission equipment had better figure out how to stay in business - probably buying excess electricity from people who can generate more than they need and distributing it to people who can't generate enough. Except in certain circumstances, large generation plants become a thing of the past, since small generation facilities powered by the sun, or wind, or natural gas, can be established at the home. Perhaps we'll even move from AC to DC?

One of the challenges in looking forward and trying to create new ideas is the concept that we have a hard time shaking our assumptions. These tend to get carried along and become barriers to our thinking, so we project a future that is only slightly different from the present. In some cases, those assumptions may be true, but in other cases the assumptions are totally wrong. There are several famous pronouncements from those who probably should have known better about the future of the PC. The head of DEC once said that no one needed a personal computer, and Bill Gates is on the record in the early 80s wondering why anyone would need more than 1MB of memory in a PC. These guys and plenty of others never forced themselves to turn their assumptions and givens inside out and look at the world in that light.

In your business right now, what are the "givens" that you operate on? Perhaps a technological constraint, or legal or regulatory constraint, or some cost constraint. What are your assumptions? What would happen if the "givens" were somehow overturned? How would that change your market or industry? You can bank on the fact that sometime in your working life, one or two of the "givens" you held dear will be overturned. Whether it is something like open source or Software as a Service versus licensed software, or some dramatic change in federal regulations, or the introduction of an automobile engine based on something other than internal combustion, it will happen. The question will be whether or not you've considered the possibilities and how you react to the changes.

If you have an innovation team, they should be doing this exercise every year. What givens do we hold as sacred? If they were repealed or overturned, what would happen to our business? Someone, somewhere is working to overcome your givens. Some competitor somewhere sees your givens as assumptions that can be violated or changed. Will your firm be ready when the change comes?