Beyond Knowing: The Power of Questioning Our Assumptions
I was going through the feedback from our recent three-day workshop at Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, IIT Madras when one comment caught my attention. A participant described it as their first experience of really getting to know their customer.
That set me thinking.
Having worked with hundreds of startup teams, researchers and entrepreneurs, I have often wondered how much of what we call ‘learning’ actually changes the way we think and act. We attend programmes, read books, acquire frameworks, listen to experts and collect tools. We come away knowing more.
But knowing more and understanding better are not necessarily the same thing.
There are a few patterns I have observed repeatedly.
We look for confirmation more often than contradiction.
We ask questions, but are we genuinely open to answers that challenge what we believe? Or are we really looking for evidence to support conclusions we have already reached?
But over the years, I have found that the biggest competitor is often not another startup or another product. It is the customer’s current way of doing things. It is the process they have become comfortable with. It is the workaround they have developed over time.
We mistake familiarity for understanding.
Working on a technology for years does not necessarily mean we understand the people who might use it. Reading market reports does not mean we understand a market. Being immersed in something does not automatically give us the perspective to see it differently.
We get better at defending our thinking, rather than questioning it.
The more time and effort we invest in an idea, the better we often become at explaining why it makes sense. But do we become equally good at recognising when our assumptions are wrong?
These are not necessarily failures of intelligence or effort. They are quite human tendencies. I find myself paying less attention to how much people say they have learnt, and more to what they begin to question afterwards.
What assumptions are they revisiting? What are they looking at differently? What might they now do differently?
Because if we come away from a learning experience with more knowledge but exactly the same assumptions, I am not sure how much has really changed.
Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to learning is not what we do not know. It is what we think we already know.
