Questioning Assumptions

The singlemost important device for solving problems is,
- the question.

When Edwin Land's daughter was a small child, she wasn't highly educated and she wasn't especially clever.  However, she once asked her father why they had to wait for photographs to be developed.  Edwin Land was a scientist and started thinking about the problem.  As a consequence, the Polaroid camera was developed.

It would have been very easy to take for granted the fact that you had to wait for photographs to be developed, as it had always be so.  But because she knew nothing about the process, she was not inhibited by her experience (so much for received wisdom).

The questions we ask need not be complex, technical or brilliant.  If the daughter had qualified the question by asking if it was possible to get the photos 2-3 days quicker, a better process may have been developed, but it is unlikely that a revolutionary one would have resulted. 

It is the simple questions that provoke the richest ideas because they do not constrain our thinking and they test our fundamental assumptions.

Questions enable us first to identify our assumptions, and then to ask why they are so.

Solving a difficult problem is not a matter of 'scientific breakthrough' but of questioning your assumptions and breaking away from habitual thinking. When faced with a particularly difficult problem, we need to be bold with our questions. 

Your goal is to find a gap, an inconsistency, an exception, a condition whereby your assumptions do not hold.   This provides you with a new perspective and a path a solution.

There is a hierarchy of questioning that will challenge your assumptions

1. Find out what assumptions you are making
2. Ask if they are true
3. Doubt that they are true
4. Deny that they are true

Mapping as a Tool for Solving Problems

Who was the greatest medical doctor?   Hippocrates?  Pasteur?  In 2003 a poll named Dr John Snow as the greatest doctor ever.

Who?

In 1854, an outbreak of cholera had claimed 500 lives in London.  This was before the  germ theory of epidemic diseases and the prevailing theory was of ‘miasma’ or ‘bad air’.  Snow believed the cause of a local outbreak was related to the water supply.   In a ground-breaking study, he used a map to show how the deaths were clustered about a street water-pump.  This convinced the authorities to remove the pump handle and the outbreak was contained.

Snow used a map to create a new understanding.  There was nothing new in the data he had, but by mapping it using geographical co-ordinates, he was able to gain a new insight into the problem.

Maps enable you to take a new view of your information.  By using different map axes, you can display the data in different ways.  They display the relationships between the data. Any clusters in the data, begs the question ‘why are they clustered’.   Similarly, gaps in the data beg different questions. 

There are two main considerations in the use of mapping

1. What axes to use. 
2. What questions to ask.

In my blog about Assumption mapping, the axes used are ‘strength of belief’ and ‘relative importance’.  This could show, for example, which assumptions are not strongly held, but important, which gives considerable scope for exploration.  Furthermore, if you were to colour-code the assumptions by stakeholder groups, you could see clusters of a different type.  You need new ways to think about the data.

The key is to create a map that reveals something new and significant.