The safest assumptions are often the biggest barriers to growth

When growth slows, we tend to look outward first, as nothing seems to change internally. The market changes. Regulation updates. New competitors. The slowing economy in the region. Difficult customer behavior. All of these can become real barriers. Many of them are also difficult to influence.

There is something comforting about the feeling of not being able to influence external changes. If the main obstacles sit outside our sphere of influence, we can conclude that we have done what we can. We tried hard. It is not about us; the conditions were not right.

Then there are people who do not settle for conditions created by outside forces. People who challenge the persistent assumptions about what we can and cannot affect. They take the risk and are prepared to fail, because doing less is not worth the time spent. This thought stayed with me after Kasvun Huvipuisto, an event organized by the Finnish Kasvuryhmä.

One key takeaway from the event is Finlayson’s recent story. The over 200-year-old Finnish brand had been stuck in a long, slow decline when a new, controversial and risk-taking Business Director stepped in and found a way to turn things around. As an example, he had the courage to bring over €200 linen sheets named “Jesus” to the market. When authorities questioned the right to use the name, his response was: “I just had a blessing from a priest to use this name.” And he really did, via a phone call.

When asked why he had bought an old, dusty brand that had clearly seen its best days, his answer pointed to something others had overlooked: this dust meant also an almost 90% market penetration. Almost every Finn owned a Finlayson product. “You cannot create that kind of brand”, said Business Director.

All it took was a bold vision for a preferable future for the industry: becoming a more responsible textile producer. He combined that with stubbornness in making and sticking to decisions that went against the advice of many experts.

So, is there something we could use this approach for? We should not focus on what we cannot influence, but what we actually could influence if we changed just one persistent assumption. What is the assumption you would be ready to turn upside down? That question is less comfortable, because the answer may bring some of those “things we cannot influence” into our zone of influence. And that starts to look like a pile of work.

Well, it does not have to. Pick one. Just one is enough.

The assumptions closest to us are often the hardest to see

Stressing persistent assumptions is one of the jobs of a futurist. I’ve sold and completed projects, or simply facilitated single workshops, that start with a nice overview of what an organization perceives as inevitable truths.

Next, futurists do some serious horizon scanning to spot all the relevant changes (e.g. weak signals, trends, phenomena, wild cards, megatrends). When we go through the results, with my futurist mandate, our team starts turning exiting assumptions upside down, one by one, and grounding them in real-life examples. Using examples showing that the shift is already happening in some form, usually not yet visible to the whole market.

The look you see in leaders’ eyes when they realize the underlying threats and opportunities is hard to forget. Most organizations know their own business well. They have experience, customer knowledge, established ways of working, and a long history of decisions behind them. That experience is valuable. It also creates persistent assumptions. Seeing those assumptions being shift even a bit, is opening perspectives for new opportunities.

If we do not stress the established assumption, some of assumptions stop feeling like assumptions at all. They become accepted descriptions of reality:

• "We know what our customers want"

• "This market is not ready"

• "That business model would not work here"

• "We have already explored the realistic options"

• "This is how our industry works"

Statements like these often sound reasonable because they are based on experience. In many cases, they may also have been true for years. The question is whether they are still true today. The “safest assumptions” are often the ones nobody feels a need to revisit. They limit the spectrum of your growth ideas: make you bind for obvious opportunities.

Strategic stagnation can begin with certainty

Organizations rarely stop growing because everyone suddenly decides to resist change. Stagnation develops more gradually. Existing beliefs shape what receives attention. New information is interpreted through familiar models. Weak signals that do not fit the current view are treated as exceptions. People who want to shake things up are seen as difficult outliers. Unfamiliar opportunities appear less credible than ideas that resemble what has worked before.

Experience starts reinforcing itself, feeding a tightening loop of beliefs that makes you feel there is not much you can really influence. Well, you can, but then the risk of becoming the difficult outlier rises. And who likes to take these risks?

This is one reason why exercises that help stress persistent strategic assumptions deserve more attention. It should not be only one person’s burden, or responsibility, to shake those assumptions. It could become a habit of an organization.

Goals, priorities, resources, and actions are often documented in detail, while many of the assumptions behind them remain implicit.

We record what was decided, without being clear about the assumptions we relied on, for that decision to make sense. That becomes a problem in tho long run. If the underlying assumptions stay the same while the environment changes, and the organization does not notice the gap, the strategy can remain internally consistent while becoming less relevant to the world around it.

Slow decline, with a feeling of not being able to influence the forces coming from outside.

Foresight can help make assumptions visible

One of the useful roles of strategic foresight is not to predict what will happen. It is to make present-day assumptions easier to see and examine.

• What do we believe about our customers, competitors, technologies, regulations, supply chains, or markets?

• Which of those beliefs are (still) supported by current evidence?

• Which are inherited from earlier decisions?

• Which have simply not been challenged for a long time?

Horizon scanning can surface weak signals that put pressure on persistent assumptions. But collecting signals is only the first step. The more difficult part is deciding what those signals mean.

A single observation may not be enough to change a strategic view. Several related signals, appearing over time and across different sources, may deserve more attention. The task is to notice when evidence begins to accumulate against something the organization has taken for granted.

This is where organizational foresight becomes more than an annual trend exercise.

The problem is not that organizations never question their assumptions. Most strategy teams can do that in a workshop. The harder problem is be consistent, create a habit of assumptions testing, as trying to guess when those assumptions should be questioned again is hard.

• Who notices when contradictory evidence starts to build?

• Where is that evidence kept?

• How does it connect back to the assumptions behind current strategy?

• When does a weak signal become relevant enough to discuss?

• Who gets to challenge the prevailing interpretation?

These are questions of process and system design as much as mindset.

Assumption testing needs continuity

If foresight lives in isolated reports, slide decks, or individual experts’ notes, it is difficult to build this continuity. A useful foresight system keeps signals, trends, interpretations, and strategic questions connected over time. It gives people a shared place to compare new evidence with earlier thinking, and to see how interpretations change.

This is also where tools can help. In FIBRES, for example, teams can collect and monitor weak signals, connect them to broader trends, assess their relevance together, and keep the source evidence traceable. That does not remove the need for judgment. It gives that judgment a clearer evidence base and a shared place to develop over time.

AI can widen the amount of information a team is able to scan and monitor. But the important part is what happens after that. Humans still need to decide which signals matter, which assumptions they challenge, and what those changes mean for strategy.

A mature foresight capability is not built around finding more information. It is built around learning from new information before old assumptions become constraints.

If you’re exploring how to build that capability in your own organization, take a look at how FIBRES helps teams turn scattered signals into shared, evidence-based foresight, or book a demo with me to see it in practice.