Quotes About Assumptions

We don't like to have our basic assumptions challenged. It's too threatening.

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.

The danger is in acting on what you believe satisfies the customer. You will inevitably make wrong assumptions. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers; it should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers.

To supply data is not enough. The data have to be integrated with strategy, they have to test a company's assumptions, and they must challenge a company's current outlook. One

There are several kinds of incongruity: – An incongruity between the economic realities of an industry (or of a public-service area); – An incongruity between the reality of an industry (or of a public-service area) and the assumptions about it; – An incongruity between the efforts of an industry (or a public-service area) and the values and expectations of its customers; – An internal incongruity within the rhythm or the logic of a process.

In a heated debate, the novice at working with mental models will have to make an effort to identify the assumptions he is making and why. Often the beginner's efforts in a discipline are characterized by time displacement: only after the debate, does one see one's assumptions clearly and distinguish them from the "data" and reasoning upon which they are based.

Just as the Boeing 247's engineers had to downsize their engine because it lacked wing flaps, systems thinking without the discipline of mental models loses much of its power. The two disciplines go naturally together because one focuses on exposing hidden assumptions and the other focuses on how to restructure assumptions to reveal causes of significant problems.

Managers must learn to reflect on their current mental models—until prevailing assumptions are brought into the open, there is no reason to expect mental models to change, and there is little purpose in systems thinking. If managers "believe" their world views are facts rather than sets of assumptions, they will not be open to challenging those world views.

get out into the world to challenge their own assumptions, says, "No facts exist inside the building, only opinions." As a former marketer, Blank's point is that people won't know what problems they are actually solving for customers if they always stay in their cubicles.

Many Rationals are obsessed with speculative enquiry, so their speech tends to be laced with assumptions and presuppositions, probabilities and possibilities, postulates and premises, hypotheses and theorems.

If your beauty is unquestioned, so many other things can go unquestioned as well.

People in Ohio are late all the time.

It must come from your father's side of the family, Allison informed her with severe disapproval. You never got that sort of dreary, plebeian logic from my genes, dear! Beowulfans' cognitive processes rely far more on the creative and intuitive manipulation of concepts without the drudgery of applying reason to them. Don't you realize how badly you can damage a perfectly good preconception or assumption if you insist on thinking about it that way? That's why I never indulge in such a vice.

All kinds of daily interactions would be altered if we suspended our insufficiently informed conclusions over why others act the way they do.

Time is a dimension of human understanding, a challenge to our assumptions, imagination and our ability to make and, on occasion, break connections.

Negative interpretations are a good example of mind reading. Mind reading occurs when you assume you know what your partner is thinking or why he or she did something. When you mind-read positively, it does not tend to cause any harm. But when your mind reading includes negative judgments about the thoughts and motives of the other, you may be heading toward real trouble in your marriage.

The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted or believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed

Most of the accepted social behavior-patterns assume segregation to be normal—if normal, then correct, if correct, then moral; if moral, then religious. Religion is thus made a defender and guarantor of the presumptions.

One should not make more assumptions than are absolutely necessary.

People cannot handle prejudice because they try to deal with the symptom. Prejudice is the symptom, wrong assumptions are the cause. 'Prejudice is the daughter of assumption.

Learning how to learn involves examining assumptions. Mulla Nasrudin tales very often fulfil this funcition.

Sufism, the "secret tradition," is not available on the basis of assumptions which belong to another world, the world of intellect.

People generally deal with situations by means of assumptions.

It is experience which teaches, not controversy based on supposed logic and assumptions of what is likely to be true.