THINK INSIDE THE BOX

I LEARNED ABOUT ASSUMPTIONS FROM FELIX UNGER. Felix is, of course, one half of Neil Simon’s Odd Couple, portrayed by Tony Randall when the popular play-then-movie was translated to television.

I recall watching an episode when I was about nine where Felix is defending Oscar (Jack Klugman), in court – the reason why escapes me – and chastises a woman on the witness stand because of an assumption she made. “Ah… you ‘assumed’!” Felix proclaims. He leaps to a nearby blackboard and scrawls the word in thick, self-righteous chalk capitals. “My dear, you should never ‘assume,” he says, then underlines three parts of the word. “You see, when you ‘assume’ you make an ASS of U and ME!”

I thought it was pretty funny. (It was 1973. I liked wordplay even as a child, but I suspect the fact that he said “ass” tickled my funny bone as much as anything.)

USEFUL BUT DANGEROUS

The point lingered longer than the laugh, though. Assumptions serve a useful purpose. They help us navigate the routine moments of life without reanalyzing everything. I assume, for example, when I get in the shower that water will come out and not chocolate milk. I assume when I drive over those rows of spikes at the car rental return lot that they won’t blow out my tires. And it’s nice not to have to count my fingers when shopping for gloves. I just assume the number I went to bed with is the number I woke up with.

But assumptions can be misleading. In fact, the manipulation of assumptions is far more important to a magician than the manipulation of objects. Without the first, the second simply becomes juggling. Most of the time, though, we don’t need a magician to be fooled; instead we mislead ourselves. I parked my blue Dodge Neon near the front of the store, so I assumed the one I saw when I came out was mine, until I tried my key – and realized Dodge made more than one blue Neon and this one wasn’t mine.

They can be embarrassing. Geez, I’m sorry, President Bush, I assumed you knew the microphone was on when you called that New York Times reporter an asshole.

And occasionally they can be dangerous, even tragic. The newspaper said the child assumed the gun wasn’t loaded.

Assumptions can be equally misleading, embarrassing or dangerous in the creative process. In fact, questioning assumptions may be one of the primary activities in creative problem solving. (For an especially fun look at “Maybe-I-can-fix-my-car-with-some-Skittles-and-lint” type moments of assumption-questioning in action, check out “What Would MacGyver Do?: True Stories of Improvised Genius In Everyday Life.” For a more serious discussion of the life-changing benefits of avoiding assumptions, check out the best-selling “The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.”)

THE FIRST MANDATE

As one of the co-chairs of the Fleishman-Hillard global Marketing Communications Practice Group, I recently was part of developing “The Five Marketplace Mandates” — imperatives we believe have to be observed in order to successfully communicate with relevance to today’s consumers. The first mandate? Question assumptions:

“We take a zero-based approach to planning. Too many things have changed too quickly to make assumptions about tactics or channels. We start with the consumer and the brand’s message and let them — rather than habits — be our compass.”

More about the Five Marketplace Mandates in a future post …

IF ASSUMPTIONS ARE THE VENOM,
QUESTIONS ARE THE ANTIDOTE

Because assumptions result from the conditioning effect of pattern recognition, to be most effective in the creative process we need tools to consciously identify existing patterns, break old patterns and create new patterns. The most powerful tool I know of to do that is questions. I recall an old quote along the lines of “the quality of the science depends on the quality of the questions asked.” Substitute the word “creative” for “science” and you have an equally true statement.

One of my most frequent crusades these days is against brainstorms built too heavily around a single (and a singularly lazy) question: “What can we do?” The result is inevitably a limited retread of old ideas because that particular question, in fact, is a poor one for producing possibilities. Instead, asking “what can we do” is more likely to produce an inventory of past solutions. Unquestioningly applying a past solution to a new problem is an exercise in dangerous assumption-making.

I’ve become almost Socratic in my approach to facilitating brainstorms and now structure them around asking lots and lots of questions that force us to attack the same challenge from a multitude of vantage points.

“What is this like? When was your earliest memory of dealing with this sort of thing? Who else has solved a problem like this and what can we learn from them? What does this problem look like if we shift the point of view to that of a child, or other counter-intuitive segment of the population? What would we do if we were trying to get our message to just one person, rather than an entire target audience? What would we do if we were trying to accomplish the opposite of our actual goal?” and on and on.

When I first began using a heavily question-driven approach, I was stunned at the difference in the quantity and quality of the brainstorm output, and the frequency with which we overcame what we thought were definitive assumptions. In fact, one of the most useful assumption-challenging questions I’ve stumbled across is the most direct: “What assumptions are we making about this situation?”

BREAKING BIG ASSUMPTIONS FOR BIG BREAKTHROUGHS

If you consider that question long enough, you may be surprised at how deep your assumptions go. I recall when I really began to understand this. Several years ago I was talking with then-colleague, Ron Arp, who was senior to me at Fleishman-Hillard, about how we were going to approach a particular new business presentation. Most new business presentations follow a pretty traditional sequence: share your credentials, make an observation about the situation, recommend an approach or specific actions, share work you’ve done for other clients in a similar vein, reinforce why you’re the best ones for the job, etc… then ask for the business. There’s nothing in particular wrong with that, but it is based on a big assumption: selling has to look like selling. 

Ron told me we were going to just go have a conversation with the client and really listen to what they had to say, and respond with total honesty what we thought would help them.

“If you really want to sell someone,” he told me, “don’t do anything that looks like selling.”

We won the business.

© 2007 John Armato
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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Thinking, PR & Marketing, Creativity, Magic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.