Wrong assumptions
“The assumption that young people are apathetic, the assumption that Republicans won’t cross over, the assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor and that the poor don’t vote, the assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate, whites can’t support the African-American candidate, blacks and Latinos cannot come together. We are here tonight to say that that is not the America we believe in.”
—Barack Obama, American Rhetoric (delivered January 26, 2008)
Assumptions are things we take for granted and can be built up over time or can can be created within seconds. Wrong assumptions can separate just about any two individuals. For example, my partner is working late, so he or she must be having an affair. Assumptions can divide cultures, political parties and groups such as Boomers and Millennials.
An assumption can seem to grow out of nothing. But when we take a closer look, we find it’s usually something we learned and embedded into our persona and do not question. In his book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, Daniel Goleman talks about perception selection, the way we see the world through a frame or lens. The downside is we miss anything that is outside of the frame. Thus our selection of data is our reality and what we “see.” We assume everyone else has the same lens.
This aligns with the thinking of Chris Argyris, who introduced the Ladder of Inference. The Ladder of Inference was subsequently presented in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. It illustrates how our thinking generates pathways of increasing generalizations, that can lead to misguided beliefs and actions. It’s these types of assumptions that become beliefs and are accepted as reality that can really screw things up for us when we act on them.
Because our assumptions live at a subconscious or unconscious level, we need to check our assumptions regularly, especially when we need to make a decision or are waiting for an outcome. Our assumptions affect how we work with people. In short, our assumptions influence how we see our world, how we show up and how we serve our clients and each other.
~Dene Rossouw