Beware of Hidden Assumptions!

Posted by admin on March 27, 2009 under Uncategorized |

I am currently hosting an exchange student from Italy. Yesterday, I picked her up after school and she showed me some extra credit math problems she was working on. There were four problems to work out, and she was having trouble with one of them. (This student is getting an A+ in pre-calculus, so who am I to help???) She explained how she tried all combinations of possible answers, but she couldn’t get the problem to work out correctly. I suggested we write the problem on my white board when we returned home, and ponder the problem together.

As soon as we arrived at the house, my student wrote out the problem on the board. We reviewed the instructions for completing the assignment. Then, she proceeded to explain to me how she worked through each of the possible solutions. I listened to her explanation for a few minutes, and considered how the problem could be solved.

As she explained her thought process in addressing the problem, it occurred to me that she was making an assumption about a portion of the answer. I asked her “Why are you assuming this has to be a single digit? Could the answer actually be a double digit number?”

Once she looked at the problem again, she quickly saw that her assumption about the answer was faulty, and she was easily able to solve the problem.

The moral of this story? When reviewing your current processes:

1)       Be careful of the assumptions you are making about what is/is not, or can/cannot be done. Often times we place artificial limitations on ourselves in considering what we could be doing differently.

2)       Consider bringing someone in from outside your environment to review what you are doing. This person comes in without preconceived ideas about how things are/should be done. Further, this person is in the ideal position to ask the “stupid” questions about why you are doing something. This fresh perspective often creates an “ah, ha” moment which leads to breakthrough and creative ideas about potential improvements.