How to See Your Hidden Assumptions

Your mindset naturally constrains your ability to consider alternatives and possibilities that go beyond the boundaries of your thinking. Your limiting assumptions can be about personal skills, team knowledge, and abilities, organizational capabilities, market needs, technology, financial limitations, partnership possibilities, competition, or just about anything else. 

When it comes to strategy and innovation, success depends on how fast you become aware of your assumptions and then modify them. But it's a paradox: You can't see your most fundamental assumptions until you overcome them.

When it comes to developing your strategy or innovating, get clear on what you need to know and learn.

• List up to 4-5 topics. For example, the most successful social media influencers.
• For each topic, create a list of guiding questions that, if answered, would really give you a solid understanding of the area.

This exercise will help you better understand what's most important to further explore so you can broaden your perspective.

Find a company completely outside of your industry or market and look at what makes them different and what they do really well. Then adapt their model to your cause.

• Use the format "I want to be the ___________ of ____________" by putting a company name into the first blank and the area of your target market or innovation area into the second blank. For example, if you want to transform the fashion industry, you might try "I want to be the Netflix of fashion"_.
• Consider companies like Starbucks, Twitter, Domino's, NIKE, Home Depot, or any other innovative company.