Employing Differences, Episode 116: What are we assuming?

Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What are we assuming?"

Karen: 0:28

And I think we're gonna go today mostly with individual experience within a group – although groups do this too. But we were talking before we hit the record button on this episode about a client I was working with who lead with, "I want to get these other people to do things differently. I'm ending up having to do a lot of work. And if other people would do these things, then that would solve my problem." And as we explored it, I said, "Well, what I'm hearing is that you would like to be doing less work.""Yep. Yep. That's what I want." And I said, "So what would happen if you just did less work? What would happen if you just stopped doing those things?" "Oh, well, but I really am attached to this project. And I've put a lot into it. And it really matters to me. And, you know, there's nobody else who could do it. And if I got hit by a bus, it would all just fall apart." And I said, "Okay, so maybe what you need is someone else to also learn this project and be working on it with you.""Oh, that could get really hard. I don't know. There's a lot of details and a lot of pieces to it." And so it was this sort of sense of, I think I know what I want, but when we start exploring that, there are a lot of assumptions built in. And Paul, I'm gonna pass it to you for your sort of analysis of this.

Paul: 2:03

Yeah. So this is a thing that, that I see a lot. Snd I'm aware of how I do it a lot. And it's a thing that's there. We get caught in this dilemma that we often don't realize, where we have a thing that we want to do– nd this happens as you point out, both individually and collectively. We say, hey, we want to go do this new thing, we want to learn this new skill, we want to work in this new way, we want to be more collaborative, we want to hand off this work to somebody else, we want to delegate. Whatever it is, there's this thing that we can see that if we could do it, it would make our lives better. And then we can notice if we step back – and this is something that I often coach individuals and groups to do is to take this fearless inventory of what are all the things we're currently doing that are getting in the way of this thing that we say that we want. And usually there's a whole bunch of things that come out. Often there's some self judgment and some shame around, "Oh, I just shouldn't be doing that." I'm like, "No, no, no. Here's the thing. You're doing that for a reason." There are very good reasons why you're doing it. And if you imagine doing the opposite of those things. If you imagine giving this thing up, if you imagine, instead of hoarding information, you imagine sharing all the information, that you have. If you imagine doing the opposite of those things, one of the things that exposes is all of the stuff that we're afraid will happen, and that we are deeply committed to protecting ourselves from. Because that's what's usually going on. When we have this thing that we're trying to get better at or trying to shift towards, and we're not making progress towards it, it indicates we have some sort of non-conscious, self protective assumptions and commitments to something that that is threatening in a way we don't realize. What you were talking about working with this client was you were starting to pull back the curtain on some of these things and reveal what was hidden before. It was there, but it wasn't made explicit. And also revealing these assumptions about the way the world works, who we are, things like that, that are – as we've talked about on the show before – deeply patterned behaviors. Things that we've picked up at various points and that are generally useful to us. It just so happens that in this particular situation, with this particular change we're trying to make, those assumptions are leading to these counterproductive behaviors that are getting in the way of the change that you want. But those assumptions are also fueling the self-protective behaviors that 90% of the time are actually really good ideas. And so part of what I end up doing in these situations

exactly what you did: 4:53

Revealing the larger scope of these are these two things that are in tension. And so what are we assuming that's under that that's contributing to that tension? Because once we start to recognize what we're assuming, we can start to question it, and we can start to work with it.

Karen: 5:11

Yeah. And just to say it in a slightly different way that

occurs to me is: 5:15

We've got this whole box of things in our brains that we don't have to think about. We know these things are true. We know this is the way the world works. We know this is the way people behave. We know this is the right thing. And if we just emptied the box and got rid of them, we'd go crazy. Chaos would arrive, because we would have no boundaries, no borders. I mean, it would be like taking all the lines off the highway, and just letting everybody drive everywhere. We wouldn't have that. Those are the automatic things that keep us from having to consider 5000 possibilities and criteria and make every single decision. Those are automatically made decisions that keep us functioning, so that we can focus our energy on these few things that we don't know. So we know all this stuff. And what we're saying is that a percentage of the stuff in that box isn't actually true anymore, or isn't true enough, or isn't useful enough. And so the question is, when when we're stuck, when we're trying to make a shift – either as a group or as an individual, we're trying to make a shift – and we can't, because this stuff's in the way, we need to look at each one of those things. And what are the assumptions? And a lot of the time we're gonna say, "Yeah, that's, that's really a real thing." You know, I got to keep my job. I can't do things between eight and five because I need an income. And I can look at that every which way. And occasionally, people look at it and go, "You know what, I don't actually need that income, and I can go somewhere else." But most of us are going to end up deciding, "Yep, actually, as much as I want to make this change, I still want to pay the electric bills. I still want to keep my house. I still want to live the lifestyle I'm living. I'm gonna keep this job." Whatever the things are, a huge percentage of them, when we take them out, we hold them in our hands, and we put them in front of ourselves, and we look at them, we're gonna go, "Yep, that's a real true thing." But some of them – and this is the secret to making changes – some of them we're going to look at and go, "Maybe not. Maybe that thing doesn't have to be."

Paul: 7:32

Yeah, for me, it's "It's not as true, as I seem to believe that it is in this particular situation." What usually happens is that we're over generalizing. We're taking these things that are usually true, but making them truer than they actually are in the current moment, in the thing that we're in. So I'm gonna go back to the example you were bringing up of this person who was saying, "I'd like to not work quite so hard on these things. I'd like someone else to take these. But also, I have this commitment to maintaining something about the quality of this." And there's some assumptions embedded in there, which have varying degrees of truth in them. So one of them is there's an assumption that, "No one else could do this as well as I do. Ever." And here's the thing, that might be true right now. Nobody else in the group can do it as well as I can right now. But the assumption is that no one could ever do it as well as I could. And there is some question in there. There's another assumption in there, which is that "It needs to be done as well as I am doing it now for it to be at all valuable." That's an assumption. And that may, again, may or may not be true. Where we get stuck is this idea that we simply believe these things are true. We don't question them. Because they're usually nonconscious. We're not talking about them. We're not bringing them up. And so in the situation you were talking about, we're bringing this thing forward and saying, "So it seems like this is at play," that's a place where we can start to interrogate it and, go, "Hmm, maybe it's not as true as I seem to be behaving as it is." Because that's the other part. We can say, "Oh, I don't actually believe that," but all of our behaviors imply that. We are acting as though that it is true. And that's often where that place of shame and self judgment comes in. Where it's like, "I don't actually believe this. Why do I keep doing this thing?" It's because there's some deep patterned behavior that keeps showing up around it. And so we need to loosen the grip those assumptions have on us – not throw out the box, as you point out, because we'd become non-functional if we do that – but just go "In this particular situation, how can I see that these assumptions have me?" It's not that I have them. They've got me.

Karen: 10:09

A place I saw it happen in my life was raising my kids. I had a child who was really resistant to anything like traditional schoolwork. And I'd been a public school teacher, so I knew how to teach reading. And we decided to homeschool, partly because this was a kid who really hated school, didn't want to be there. And you know, and I just kept throwing those phonics in front of him. And I'm using all of my teacher school methods. Okay, so it's not phonics, maybe he's going to be a sight word, kid. But he has to work on reading because he has to learn to read. And at some point, I came across a statistic– or reminded myself – that actually there is no correlation between the age at which a person learns to read and how well they read. And that this societal norm of kids should be reading by kindergarten or kid should be reading by a certain age, I was working that assumption. And I just kept trying to get him to do things that he didn't want to do. And he was my absolute best teacher in life ever, because he resisted that stuff. And he just wasn't going to let me push him in that direction. He knew it wasn't right. And then at some point, he was about seven, and had never read a sentence really in his life, and got interested in comic books and started reading Calvin and Hobbes. And three months later, he was reading Narnia, and the kid was a phenomenal reader, and ended up with an incredible vocabulary. Because I let myself let go. I went, "Okay, it'd be great if he'd learn to read. And that's a thing a lot of kids do. And that's the thing our society does. And it's a thing I know how to do." There's all these reasons, but this kid isn't willing to do it. And I'm not willing to do what it would take to make him do it. He is more willing to resist than I am willing to force or enforce. And I'm just going to choose to trust. I'm going to let go of the assumption that spending time learning to read is important in the life of a six year old and say, "Okay, I'm going to unlearn that lesson that was so deep in me." That was that assumption, and say,"For my situation with my kid, that's not actually how this is going to work. And at some point, I think he'll learn to read." But that was a letting go. And I didn't let go of everything I'd ever believed about parenting. I didn't let go of reading to him. I didn't let go of offering things to him. We went to the library still. There were lots of things that I believed were good that I kept doing. But that one piece about,"He has to work on it every day in some kind of program, and in some structured way," I just let it go.

Paul: 12:50

And what that really points to is where those assumptions come from. It's things that have worked. Things that have been useful to us in the past. You're like, Hey, I've done it. I was a teacher. I know all this stuff. I did these things. It was useful." And so again, that's that place of over generalizing. "I had this belief. I applied it in these situations. It was valuable to me in this way. Therefore, it's universal. Therefore, it applies to all people everywhere throughout all time." One of the things that I tend to do when I work with clients around this kind of thing is I do that blanket overgeneralizing, blow it way up sort of thing. Because when we notice that, and somebody else is doing it – because it's way easier for someone else who doesn't have that assumption to point out that there's an even bigger and more ridiculous version of it than the one we carry – it can sometimes help us go, "Oh, actually, there is a smaller version of this." And so it's what you were saying there. You didn't let go of everything. You didn't say, "I'm just going to abandon all of my assumptions about my responsibilities as a parent. I'm just going to say maybe, in this particular situation, this particular belief about reading, maybe it doesn't apply. What happens if I just run the experiment? What happens if I try it?" And to be fair, that's a risky assumption to test. The experiment you ran? Super risky. Because I also imagine there's all kinds of deeper assumptions under that. Where it's like, "If your child does not reading by age seven, you're a terrible parent, and you're a horrible human being." Those are ginormous assumptions. That's where we really get stuck in some of these. There are a lot of these deep assumptions about how we derive our worth as human beings that we often don't recognize that are coming up. Those are the ones that when we can start to relax a little bit more, what it does is it opens up a whole realm of possibilities. Because the thing about overgeneralize in these assumptions is they limit what we're able to do. They close off parts of the world to us. And when we're able to notice them, and step back and sort of"right-size" them – again, it's not that they're wrong; it's that that they're not actual size. We've blown them up. And if we can right-size them, that gives us a way more opportunities for action, way more opportunities for doing things that were closed off to us before, both as individuals and as groups.

Karen: 15:36

Yeah, and I'm glad we're getting back a little bit to groups, because I think a place that this applies in groups is that when groups are stuck, it's highly likely that individuals are stuck in this dynamic. Particularly if you're stuck on like, "I just don't understand, why are they resisting this thing?" And especially if you're in the space of assumptions that are commonly held. I've seen groups tangle over, "Every team, every subject group has to post the agenda a week before their meeting so that people will know." There are people who don't work that way. There are meetings that happen where we get to the meeting and then we make the agenda. But it's said in such a way with this assumption, that this is what a responsible team would do and this is what makes for good collaboration and this is what's good in the world. And it probably is for someone. Like the person proposing it, it probably does work for them. And they're making assumptions that it works for everyone, and that it's the best way to run a meeting, and so on and so forth. And there's a fair chance that the other side of that doesn't get said. And this is where you want to have that culture of curiosity, the culture of feedback, the culture where people can say what they're feeling. Because I can kind of guess that in any room where somebody is saying, "Okay, we should have a policy that every agenda has to be posted a week before," there is someone in the room who would be held by that rule shrinking and going, "Oh, I hate this job. I don't want to do this." Their motivation and buy-in is tanking, but they aren't saying. And so if we can get good at going down a layer and asking about assumptions and getting curious about, "So what's useful about posting the agenda in advance, and what does it cost?" Because this is one of the things that we tend to assume that it's necessary, without weighing it against what it costs to do it. And so if we can start looking at, "Okay, what's useful about that? Why would we need it? And then what does it cost us to have it? And how do we prioritize the benefits from the costs?" Just getting behind those assumptions, we can come closer as a group. So it's a way to get unstuck. Getting good at both – of course, if I can get good at doing it myself, that's one thing, but we aren't going to count on everybody in the group being good at doing it ourselves. It's actually super helpful if there are others in the group that are in a respectful and caring way able to get into the curiosity of that and ask those questions, that it often helps unstick the group.

Paul: 18:19

It comes back to a thing that we talk about a lot on the show, which is that conflict iss a prompt for getting curious about something. This is a signal that it's useful for us to do. Because as you point out, 90% of the time we have these assumptions that are useful to us. And they allow us to not have to think about stuff. And so we don't have to spend every planning session for every meeting deriving from first principles how we ought to build an agenda and what would be useful for us. Most of the time, we just do what works, what what we assume will work. And when we hit that point of conflict – in groups, it's usually conflict and tension between individuals– but in the example we kind of started with in individuals, it's that tension between the thing that I say that I want and what I'm currently doing. Both of those are tension points, are conflict points that prompt us to get curious about what's behind those things. That that's when it makes sense to slow down and ask, "Okay, if we're caught in this dilemma, what must we be assuming, that we can start to work with?"

Karen: 19:33

So just to sum up where we've been, we're proposing that all of us go through life with a box of assumptions that that we need, that are useful and helpful and make life simple enough to be functional and free up space for the stuff we do have to think about and decide. And that most of those are really, really useful, and some of them aren't. And so when we find ourselves in a situation where we're either in an internal conflict – "I want to change this thing in my life and I keep not changing it; what's going on here?" – or we're in a group where something's being proposed, and there's some conflict about that, a really useful thing to do is to look for what's in that box. Take the lid off that box and go, "What's in there, that are things that we assume, that are our norms, that are the ways that we function that are getting in the way of this change, or this conversation or this connection?" What's getting in the way of the thing we want? And then just take it out and look at it. Is it a thing that actually is true and needed and necessary? Or is it not at all true and not at all necessary? Or more likely not so relevant to this situation as I was thinking it was? Or a thing that we want to prioritize differently? Like, we want to bring it into consciousness, so that we can decide how would you prioritize it with the other thing that we want? And when we can do that and get really curious about it, we can get unstuck and able to make the changes that we're looking to make.

Paul: 21:05

Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 21:10

And I'm Karen Gimnig and this has been Employing Differences.