Posts Tagged ‘intuitition’
Assumptions
Assumptions are probably the single biggest barrier to good communication. The problem is, that we all assume things, and then don’t bother to check the details. This happens everywhere, and all the time. We all do it! The problem with assumptions is that they leave details unsaid. In a great number of cases, this leads to someone doing something they don’t need to do (over-working), or something being missed entirely.
As a trivial example, imagine you asked me to paint your bathroom. If I assume that your bathroom is about the same size as mine (quite small), and that you want it painted like mine (a light creamy colour), then I might be able to give you an estimate for the cost of the work. I happen to have some of that cream paint left over, so I can do it cheaply for you. Now imagine that when I come over to do the work, your bathroom is bigger than my entire house, and you actually want it painted blue. Clearly, my original estimates are going to be completely wrong. Now I either need to do lots of work without getting paid, or we need to agree that actually you want it a creamy colour instead of blue, or you need to pay far more than you expected.
All that’s a pretty obvious problem. A lot of people would intuitively be able to look at the decorating “problem” and work out that size and colour are important details, so we’d be careful to point them out. However, there are of course all sorts of other details about decorating we don’t intuitively know, and so won’t think to pass them on. When problems get more complex, we don’t have the same amount of intuitive knowledge, so we don’t know so much about the solution, and we don’t know which details are important.
What we can see from all this is that the recipient of our information makes assumptions because we (the sender) make assumptions on their behalf, and probably do so without thinking about it. We unwittingly direct our audience to formulate incomplete conclusions in a way that we want them to. We’d probably be happy a that point, merrily believing that everyone had all the information they needed, and that everything was well managed. The odd thing is that this exuberance is often sub-consciously passed on to our audience, so they probably also think they have all the information they need. It’s only when they start looking at it in detail that they’ll realise they don’t know nearly enough.
The point here is that bad assumptions lead to bad things happening. As the sender of information, we need to be careful about what we assume the receiver knows, doesn’t know and needs to know. As the receiver, we need to be careful about what we assume about what we’re being told, and we also need to be sure to evalute what we’re being told carefully, and not to “add” to it with our own imagination. In short, we’ve got to be careful not to project ourselves into the actual content of what’s being discussed.