Article

Using assumptions as a problem-solving tool

Author shares a four-question approach to isolating and solving operational problems.

October 26, 2010

Mark Levy is the founder of Levy Innovation, a marketing strategy and ideation firm. The following is excerpted from his new book "Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content" (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010) with kind permission. Mark was also one of the speakers at this year's Retail Customer Experience Executive Summit — have you made your plans to attend next year's event yet?

A few years back, my wife asked for help in designing a magic trick.

Now, asking me to design a trick isn't such an odd request, given that I've been interested in magic for forty years and have written books on the subject. This request, though, had a catch.

My wife needed the trick, not for entertainment purposes, but for use in a computer course. Seems she was learning an advanced computer language and her professor gave the class an assignment that sounded a lot like a mind-reading stunt.

The assignment went like this: Design a program that reveals in 10 guesses or less, a number from 1 to 99, secretly chosen by the computer.

I grabbed a pad and pen, and went to work.

"Tell the computer to secretly select a number," I said while scribbling, "then ask it: 'Did you select a single-digit number? If the computer says yes, name single-digit numbers until you hit the correct one. If it says no, eliminate single-digit numbers from your search. Next, ask the computer if it chose an even number. If it says yes, eliminate odd numbers from your search. If it says no ..."

In short order, I had the trick worked out and could finger any selected number in 10 guesses, tops. Not an entertaining or deceptive trick, but one which nonetheless fit the bill. My wife studied my notes.

"Excellent!" she said, "Now all I have to do is take this mathematical algorithm you wrote and ..."

"Wait a minute," I said, "Mathematical algorithm? That I wrote? What do you mean?"

My wife explained that all the steps that went into the creation of the trick could be rightfully tagged, "mathematical algorithm." In fact, she complemented me on my mathematical mind.

"Mathematical mind?" I said, "I regularly failed math in school."

Here I was, the trick's inventor, and I had been the one it fooled. I was thinking tricks, but I was doing mathematical algorithms.

My question to you, then, is this: Where, in life might you be better served by thinking "tricks," rather than "algorithms"? Or, put another way: How can you recast what you already know to help you understand what you don't?

Remember, this is more than an exercise in semantics; it's a perspective-twister that has critical implications for how you approach a problem.

In my own example, had my wife asked me to write her an algorithm, I, quite literally, wouldn't have known step-one about how to do it. I'd have been embarrassed, my wife would have been disappointed, and I would have missed the satisfaction of doing a task I enjoy.

This idea of substituting concepts to solve problems isn't new. Substituting concepts is one of the ways you go about creating paradigm shifts.

A paradigm is a situation-dependant assumption or a set of assumptions that helps us solve problems. Unfortunately, the assumptions that assist us can blind us to other ways of acting.

1,700 years ago, people believed the earth was flat. In a way, that paradigm, that assumption, helped them because it gave them rules on living and staying safe. They didn't travel far because ... they knew they'd fall off the earth. They didn't do business far because ... they knew they'd fall off the earth. They didn't sail far because ... they knew they'd fall off the earth. Their assumption may have been constraining, but it kept their world in order. It hurt and helped them.

Today, the flat earth paradigm seems quaint. But we too have paradigms operating in all parts of our life that unnecessarily lock us into ways of thinking and behaving. How do you expose and bust out of those paradigms? The same way I wrote that algorithm: You unintentionally or intentionally ignore the rules of the situation and substitute new ones.

In the story that opened this chapter, I created movement in the situation by substituting a familiar concept ("tricks") for a foreign one ("algorithms"). But you can just as easily shake things up by doing the opposite and substituting a foreign concept for a familiar one. Let's look at how that works.

A few years ago, when I co-wrote a book on persuasion, a sports reporter phoned and asked me to comment on a story. He told me a Major League Baseball team had traded their two best players for a bunch of no-name rookies. It was a fire-sale strategy the team's owners used year after year. Why do it?

The reporter claimed that the owners didn't want to pay the stars the tens of millions of dollars each would command in salary. Instead, the owners could now pay the untested rookies a few hundred thousand dollars a piece. From that angle, it saved ownership an enormous sum.

The trouble, though, had to do with season ticket sales.

When it came to season tickets, the team had long had among the worst sales in baseball. Many analysts pointed to the owners' proclivity to trade away its stars for cheaper talent. Each year, the fans would feel betrayed, and would express their ire by holding back ticket purchases.

The reporter wondered how I, a persuasion guy, would persuade disgruntled fans to buy season tickets to watch a group of unknowns? What advice would I give the team's owners?

The first thing that hit me was paradigms and assumptions. Judging from the perennially low attendance figures, the team's owners had some odd assumptions about building a fan base. Or, perhaps they were just blind to the options in front of them. A way of busting through their blinders was through concept substitution.

"If the problem is how to build a ticket-buying fan base for a group of unknowns," I told the reporter, "the thing the owners should do is see who else has solved that problem. In other words, who has built the biggest, most rabid, fan base from nothing, and how did they go about building it?"

The first place I suggested that the owners look at is other major league baseball franchises. Maybe they'd spot a tactic that looked interesting. More than likely, though, they'd see fan-base-building strategies that were familiar to them, since they were in the same field and probably operated from similar assumptions.

The next place they could look at is franchises in other professional North American sports, such as the National Football League, the National Baseball Association, and the National Hockey League. They'd have comparable fan-base-building practices to baseball, but their situations were different enough so they wouldn't be identical.

After looking there, I'd advise that the team's owner's look at sports in other countries to understand how they solved the problem. Baseball was invented in America, but it has die-hard fans in Japan. How did that happen? What can be learned from there and applied here?

Where the baseball team's ownership would really learn something new, though, was by looking outside the world of sports. How were fan-bases built for ideas and initiatives in other fields, such as politics, music, philosophy, medicine, manufacturing, engineering, urban planning, reality TV, community activism?

Looking into other fields was where the real "paradigm shift" can occur. The reason: Every field has perceptual blinders, but one field's blinders are likely different from the next field's. When you look through their lens, you see things in an entirely fresh way.

The reporter knew politics. He said that creating a fan base for an unknown reminded him of the Democrats and John Kerry. When Kerry was nominated for the primary, he was not well-known across the country. The Democrats had to come up with ways of getting him fans in a hurry.

The reporter began mentioning the Democrats' strategies. Each time he did, we applied it to the baseball team's situation. Some of our ideas seemed silly. Some seemed mundane. But some seemed unusual and practical. We laughed at how good some of these ideas were when just moments earlier we had nothing.

How then would you use the concept substitution in your freewriting? Use the page to ask and answer these four questions:

1. What problem am I trying to solve?

(Be general in your wording here. Nothing too specific. Examples of good general problem statements: "How do I build a fan base for something unknown." "How do I sell a product to a market that thinks it understands the product when it doesn't." "How do I reduce costs while increasing coverage?")

2. Who has solved it?

3. How have they solved it?

4. How can I apply their solution to my problem?

Unlike most of the strategies in this book, you'll likely have to do some light research to make concept substitution work. After all, you want to get an idea about how fields that have nothing to do with yours have solved your type of problem. You can't know that off the top of your head. Once you've done some reading, you can use your freewriting to noodle on all the ways of applying it.

Points to remember:

• Assumptions help us lead productive lives. At times, though, formerly helpful assumptions can hinder us when we don't realize they're there or we misapply them.
• There are to two ways to play with the rules: 1. Pretend an unfamiliar part of the problem is familiar. 2. Pretend a familiar part of the problem is unfamiliar. Follow the consequences of each, and see if playing with them creates movement in the situation.
• Try this: Think of a problem that's stumped you, and write for ten minutes about people who have solved a similar problem. Consider those problem-solvers in your field and those far afield. What might happen if you applied some of their strategies to your situation?

(Photo by tnarik.)