Load-Bearing Assumptions

Assumptions have earned their bad reputation. Most of them are shortcuts your brain takes to avoid the inconvenience of finding out. They cost you deals, friendships, and at least one Thanksgiving per decade.

But a few assumptions are load-bearing.

Pull them out and the whole structure of getting anything done starts to sag. The difference is the math.

A bad assumption saves you a little effort now and bills you later. A good assumption is a bet where being wrong costs pocket change and being right pays out for years.

Over the years, I’ve written down many that make a difference. Here are six.

1. Assume positive intent.

The email that reads as a slap was probably typed with one thumb in a parking lot. If you’re wrong, you lose a little pride. If you’re right, you keep a colleague, a customer, a friend. That trade is so lopsided it should be illegal.

2. Assume the work will find its people.

This one feels naive and isn’t. Distribution has never been better at matching strange things with the people who love strange things. Which means the job is no longer reaching everyone. The job is being unmistakable to someone. Make the thing sharper, weirder, more specifically yours, and trust that the sorting machinery will do what it was built to do. Watered-down work is the only thing the algorithm can’t help.

3. Assume half the time and half the budget.

Not as pessimism. As design constraint. The version of the project that survives a 50 percent cut is usually the version that should have shipped anyway. Scarcity is a brutal editor, and brutal editors are the only ones worth paying.

4. Assume the newest person in the room sees something you can’t.

You’ve gone blind to your own wallpaper. They haven’t. The week-two employee asking “why do we do it this way?” is holding a flashlight, not a complaint. Teams that assume their people know something leadership doesn’t end up with people who act like it.

5. Assume the customer is right about the pain and wrong about the cure.

When someone says “you should add this feature,” believe the ache completely and the prescription not at all. They are the world’s leading expert on how it feels and an amateur at what to build. Your job is to be the difference between those two things.

6. Assume you’ll be quoted without the context.

Every sentence you write at work will eventually travel alone: screenshotted, forwarded, pasted into a channel you didn’t know existed. Write the sentence so it survives the trip. This sounds like paranoia and is actually just positioning. Clarity is what your message wears when you’re not there to introduce it.

That’s the list. But there’s one assumption that never makes the cut, no matter how generously I squint: the assumption that anyone owes you their attention. Nobody does. Not your customers, not your audience, not your team sitting through your all-hands. Every good assumption above works because it spends your own optimism. That one spends other people’s time, and they will quietly stop lending it.

Assume the best of people. Assume nothing of their attention.

Stay Positive & Am I Calling You Out In This Post? Or Is There Positive Intent?