Assumption is the mother of all… learning
The philosopher Mr. Eugene Lewis Fordsworthe is credited as coining the original wording behind the modern phrase ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups’, a phrase I have utilised over the years with great pleasure. It’s a phrase that, like your brother growing up, awaits with uncontained joy at the expectation of the unsuspecting falling foul of the unrecognised trap.
As part of the engineering Design — Build — Test product development cycle, failures, or ‘Things Gone Wrong’ (TGW) are closely monitored as a feedback mechanism to better inform the next loop of the Design phase, and are a measure of the collective errors made in the design, build and test processes. TGW are collected through surveys and clinics and are tracked as part of the continuous improvement process in most product development systems. It gives priority to the problems reported with greatest frequency, and focus’ engineering effort on the right problems to solve. But TGWs themselves fall in to the assumption trap, namely that customers across the world are the same, and that the product will be used to fulfill the same needs or experiences by consumers around the world.
Let me explain:
As a consumer of products, I interact with them actively and passively through my senses creating a subjective impression of the product. My ability to interact and experience the product is a function of the many years of development of neural pathways in my brain through interactions with the world and other products. Taking the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s theory, either the objective physical world is the primary reality or the subjective stance of a person’s thoughts and feelings is the primary reality. Perhaps neither is right with the objective world unable to exist without the subjective experience of it, and as such, the objective world is the reality until something goes wrong and it becomes subjective. TGW would therefore be considered subjective, dependent on the person experiencing it, rather than objective, and subject to the history of the individual.
This theory can be tested by considering one of the limitation of TGW metrics. It’s often found that TGW metrics do not follow the same statistical trends in different countries, where different cultures and backgrounds serve to have a significant enough difference to the TGW metrics, when the product itself is exactly the same. Sometimes this can be due to differences in the environmental conditions for the product, but there are also examples when controlling for environment still turns up differences.
In these instances, we have the opportunity to question the intended purpose of the product, and delve deeper in to the reasons why culturally (or otherwise) the product results in a different experience. In practice this is rarely done, and the opportunity to gain insight and learning in to the assumptions about the intended use or experience of the product is lost.
As the statistician George Box famously said “All models are wrong, but some are useful”. We should pay attention to Things Gone Wrong as an insight not just to engineering fixes and errors in engineering models, but also to the assumptions underlying the way the customer is expected to use the product, and the experience they are supposed to get from the product.
As it turns out, Mr Fordsworthe revisited his assumption quote, later saying “I am in a bit of a paradox, for I have assumed that there is no good in assuming.”
Things Gone Wrong or product failures are valuable lessons that shine a light on the non-obvious assumptions that are made in the product development process.
Assumptions are the mother of all learning, and TGWs could be used to reveal assumptions about the user thought would or should happen which is valuable information all product development organisations should feed in to their innovation processes.
