Hi Reader

(3.5-ish minute read..what else would you be doing??)

In 1975, Steven Sasson invented the digital camera.

He was an engineer at Kodak; THE camera company.

His bosses looked at it and said something along the lines of:

Their underpinning assumption was that Kodak's profits would always come from film and printing. Digital photography was interesting but clearly irrelevant to their business model.

That assumption felt safe. Reasonable even, given that it was based on decades of market dominance and customer behavior.

We now know they were very wrong.

And the cost of being wrong? Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, having destroyed $30 billion in market value.

Their failure wasn’t grounded in a lack of innovation but it had its root in not being able to question an assumption that had become their identity.

See where I’m going with this?

Adam Grant puts it plainly:

But that's terribly uncomfortable, so we don't do it.

We make a decision based on an assumption. The assumption hardens into belief. The belief becomes "just how things are." And years later you're watching competitors eat your lunch because questioning that belief felt more dangerous than just maintaining the status quo. Kinda embarrassing, right?

But here's another Grant quote that hits home:

Read it again, in these times of tightly held opinions, it’s bloody important to grasp.

That's why smart people, people who “know better”, still don't challenge their assumptions. Are they just stubborn? I don’t think so, I just think that their assumptions have become part of who they are.

For example, Kodak wasn't just a film company. Their leaders were “film people”. Their identity was wrapped up in chemistry, in the magic of the darkroom, in the physical product. So, digital photography didn't just threaten their business model but the essence of who they were.

With that as a driver, first they buried it and then they buried themselves.

The military figured this out the expensive way. Catastrophically expensive.

Micah Zenko's research on Red Teams found something that should terrify every organisation:

Catastrophic. Not "suboptimal" or "inefficient." Catastrophic.

Because when you don't deliberately challenge your assumptions, you don't just make small mistakes. You make the kind that costs lives. It’s less dramatic in business but still the kind that destroys billion-dollar companies.

Retired Army Colonel Kevin Benson, who's been teaching Red Team thinking since 2007, describes what actually works:

“Think the unthinkable”, it’s not dramatic language, is it?. Perhaps it should be in everyone’s job description?

But most leadership teams don't think the unthinkable do they? No, they think the comfortable. The familiar. The things that confirm what they already believe.

Rolf Dobelli calls this the confirmation bias, and his solution is brutal in its simplicity:

Find disconfirming evidence. Not confirming. Disconfirming.

You’ve got to use inverse logic and actively hunt for reasons you might be wrong.

Makes you feel a little uncomfortable doesn’t it? It goes against every instinct. Your brain wants to find evidence you're right. It's designed to confirm your existing beliefs, strengthen your identity, and make the world predictable.

Dobelli again:

Old friends. Yes, that's way more what they feel like. You've had this belief for years. It's served you well. It's comfortable, familiar…..and it might be completely wrong now even though it was completely right then.

A live working example is a hotel group that believed they knew their customer base.They believed they had done for fifteen years and built their entire service model around assumptions about what luxury travellers wanted.

Then somebody, a new management hire who didn't know their culture yet, asked a “stupid” question: "How do we actually know this is what they want?"

After some puerile answers it turned out that they didn't really. They'd surveyed customers once in 2009. Of course 16 years later the market had shifted and customer expectations had evolved. But their entire service model was optimised for assumptions that were fifteen years out of date.

I don't believe it was them being lazy or incompetent. It was just that those assumptions had comfortably become their business identity and they earnestly viewed themselves as "the hotel group that understands luxury travelers"

Questioning that belief felt like questioning who they were. So nobody did. Until the new hire who didn't know better asked the stupid question that just might save them from becoming another Kodak.

Back to Adam Grant. He says rethinking is both a skill set and a mindset. I think that's the key bit people miss.

It's not just about being open-minded or curious in some abstract way. It's about deliberately building structures that force you to challenge your own thinking.

Red teams. Pre-mortems. Devil's advocates who are actually empowered, not just performing disagreement to tick a box. The method is not important as long as it’s mostly about hunting disconfirming evidence before it hunts you.

I’ve seen this approach work well so in your world it might be worth a go.

Pick one major decision you're working on right now. One where you're pretty confident you know the right answer.

Now ask:

What would have to be true for my assumption to be wrong?

Who disagrees with me and why haven't I seriously engaged with their reasoning?

What evidence am I ignoring because it doesn't fit my preferred conclusion?

If I knew this decision would fail, what would be the most likely reason?

Most leaders can't answer those questions honestly. They’re more than smart enough but their identity is wrapped up in being right.

Kodak had the invention, the technology and, clearly, the talent.

What they didn't have was the willingness to question an assumption that had worked brilliantly for a hundred years.

A single question would have worked: "What if film isn't forever?"

But I’m sure that question felt dangerous. It would have threatened everything they believed about their business, their customers, their identity.

So they didn't ask it. And, eventually, thirty billion dollars vanished because an assumption felt safer than a question.

What's the assumption you're not questioning right now because it's become part of how you see yourself?

There’s at least one thing you believe deeply enough that challenging it feels like losing part of your identity.

And I'll bet it's costing you more than you think. Ok, maybe not thirty billion, but something.

It’s not whether you have blind spots. We all do. The question is whether you've built systems to find them before they find you.

Because the world's happy to teach you which assumptions were wrong.

It just depends whether you want to learn before or after the catastrophe.

Another Newsletter you might find useful....

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Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community. The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone. But you don't have to do it on your own. Onward and Upward, Paul Clarke

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