Assumption, what’s your strategic function?

The journey to real insight lies in debating assumptions, not outcomes.

Geoff Wilson

You know what happens when you assume? Well, the classical answer to that question involves something unsavory that happens to you and me. But that’s not what I had in mind.

What I meant is what happens when you make assumptions about the future of your business, your competition, and your market. It’s something all strategists have to do. They can’t tell the future, but they can test assumptions about it. And testing assumptions about the future is far more rewarding and sound than testing guesses about future outcomes.

Imagine you’re trying to set a business strategy for entry into a market. Let’s say it’s the market for insulated coffee mugs. You might start your business on the notion that the outcome you seek is to sell 1,000 mugs the first year, 5,000 the second, and 10,000 the third. You reach nirvana that way.

But what matters is the assumptions you make about the market and your product in order to build to the outcome. If you’re targeting coffee mugs for truckers, you must estimate the number of truckers you need to reach in order to sell those first 1,000 mugs, and then determine the number of places that you need to carry your mugs in order to reach that many truckers (which leads to an assessment of how many mugs you should have on how many racks in how many truck stops, all driving your assumptions about working capital, how many competitive mugs are on the same racks, your price point, etc.).

Before you know it, you’ve had to make assumptions about many variables that actually matter in building up to that outcome of 1,000 mugs in the first year. And assumptions (or estimates, if you will) can be debated far better than any blanket statement about sales forecasts or market share gains.

Assumptions are where the rubber meets the road for strategy. Assumptions are testable propositions.

Too many strategic-planning exercises go sideways in the gap between “We have to grow sales by 7 percent next year” and “We can’t figure a set of assumptions that allows it.” This is especially true when a decidedly top-down view of the world (“grow by 7 percent”) collides with the reality of the bottom-up assumptions (“The market is shrinking and our competition is getting stronger.”).

Something has to give, and it’s usually either the top-down whim (in the case of sound strategic planning processes) or the bottom-up assumption (in the case of personality-driven planning processes). You’ve probably witnessed both cases.

When you make strategic assumptions, you create little test tubes that can be individually experimented with far better than strategic predictions about the overall environment. You can test a proposition about the market, but you can’t really test a statement about the market’s outcome.

When seeking to build a better strategy, you should debate assumptions about what drives reality around you, not mere statements on that reality.

What do you think? 

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