Assumptions: Turning Shovels Into Sticks

"I'll call you if we have power." Hm, not a sentence that easily rolls off the tip of most Western tongues, it is the reality that Dick faces in India.

Making a business plan is never about certainty, nothing about the future is ever "certain," just more or less probable or likely. We assume X will happen for W reasons, which, as long as the W reasons are accurate and inclusive, is the best we can hope for. Certainly there is more, volumes about planning and decision making fill bookshelves and MBA curriculums, formulas to follow and techniques to use abound, but ... in the end it all boils down to making assumptions. Guessing.

I thought we were going to use a truck.

Not all assumptions are equal. Making assumptions in/about your own country is always easier than in a new land, always easier to make in your own field than in a new area. Assumptions are also easier to make in slow-moving fields (like, say, accounting, landscaping or railroads) than in dynamic, fast-changing fields (like high tech, fashion or medical research). Yet equal or no, easy or hard, assumptions must be made.

Rolling blackouts are not something easy for most Westerners to include in a plan, brought up as we were in an environment where electricity was much like air, water or beer, there when we wanted it. No one in an OECD country included a line in a plan that, "We will achieve X if the electricity stays on."

Not so in most of the world. Adding such uncertainties into a plan is a necessary skill in the third world. * A favorite story is when the German company shipped the huge printing press to the client location in China only to find that there was no concrete floor, only dirt. Making things worse was that payment required the press be commissioned, hard to do on a dirt floor. Mind you, most Westerners would assume that the floor would be concrete.

Even the savvyist and most sensitive Westerner can make assumption mistakes. A Canadian from CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) came across farmers in a poor village in India ploughing the dirt with sticks. Realizing that while a tractor was what they really needed, there was no infrastructure (no diesel) for such a high tech solution. Thinking outside the box the official decided that shovels would be appropriate, so sent shovels when back in Canada.

As luck would have it the official was in the neighbourhood the next year and thought he'd look in on the village to see how well the shovels were working. Expecting great things he was amazed when he saw farmers still tilling the fields with sticks, though now nice round oak sticks; the shovel handles. Why?

Well, the farmers didn't have shoes, and you can't use shovels without shoes. The farmers were very happy with the wonderful sturdy stciks though, and benefitted from selling the shovel heads for scrap. They thanked the official for his help.

Not all "unique" events like blackouts have to have bad consequences. If you can think of them beforehand you can plan for them, thus mitigating bad effects. But if you don't think of them ...

Dick and I finally found a time when we both were free and he had electricity. He told me about the effect of an office with no power, and fessed up to a mistake. Sitting in his dead-machine office he lamented, "I should have bought laptops, not PCs, for the office staff. If I had they could still be working (until the batteries died)."

I don't consider it a mistake but a lesson, that he (we) must examine not just our business-specific assumptions but all assumptions, especially the basic ones. In business communication I advise Westerners in Chinese Asia to STOP whenever they make the assumption that "I don't need to explain this; s/he will already know that." It is always easier to assuage someone's hurt feelings--why did you tell me that?--than to find your shovels turned into sticks, or your capital budget spent on PCs sitting silently.

Years ago a French manager explained how the verb "assume" clearly shows the danges, that if you assume you can make an "ass" out of "u" and "me."

* can I still call it the "Third World?" Or is that no longer politically correct? Maybe the proper parlance is undeveloped, or underdeveloped, or less developed, or developing, or ... anyway, I mean no offense by the numerical term I did use. Call it--and myself--a product of my age. I am a fossil.