I spent this past weekend at a friend’s lakeside country house in a small Mexican town called Cadereyta just a two hour drive from my home. Overall, his place was magnificent: nestled in the mountains surrounded by cacti and wildlife overlooking a 42 kilometer stretch of water.
He loved it there. So did I. But Saturday evening, as we were sitting around and talking about the story of how it was built, he started telling me about the one thing that irked him every time he stepped inside the house.
Those damn pinkish-colored brick walls.
They weren’t really that pink, but they certainly weren’t brown either. He had specifically asked for brown when he was building the house. He was going for a rustic, cozy cabin in the mountains and pinkish-colored bricks didn’t quite fit.
Since he lives two hours away from Cadereyta, he went there every weekend during construction to track progress. On a Monday, he placed the order for three truckloads of bricks. Tuesday morning they were delivered. From Wednesday to Friday, workers had already mounted three walls and the house was starting to take shape.
When he arrived on Saturday, he was stunned. He immediately drove back to the city to take the brick supplier to task. What had happened?
It turned out that my friend had made a small assumption.
He assumed that the brick color that he wanted was called café (brown). It sure looked café. But no. The color he liked was actually called arena (sand).
He hadn’t thought to point out the exact color that he wanted at the shop. He hadn’t thought of confirming with a photo. He didn’t ask for a sample brick to make sure they were on the same page. He just said that he wanted café. We all know what color café is, right?
It was miscommunication that could have been easily avoided a dozen different ways with minimal effort and in practically no time at all. But with the thousands of decisions he was making as he led the construction project, he didn’t take the extra mini-step to confirm this one thing.
Since he wasn’t ready to tear down the perimeter of his house and start from scratch, he was stuck. This project would end up costing millions of pesos and the consequence of that little assumption burned. He told me that once they finished building the cabin, for the first several months he spent more time staring at the pinkish wall from his living room than admiring the beautiful lake from his patio.
With a project as stressful as building a house, just about anyone is bound to make assumptions and mistakes. But this wasn’t his first time. He had been a general contractor for over 20 years. He had built homes from the ground up for dozens of people. He had already built his first home himself.
Whether it’s a home construction project or a software development project, lazy assumptions can be costly. Often the costliest assumptions come from open-ended communication. You expect the person on the other side to see things from your perspective and work within your context. But that level of telepathic communication rarely happens. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just borrow a page from Spock and do the Vulcan mind meld?
Think about every decision you have made so far today. No doubt you have made assumptions along the way. When you have relayed info to your dev team, you have made assumptions that they understood things the way that you had intended. When we’re moving quickly, working remotely, or collaborating with distributed cross-cultural teams, all of those assumptions get magnified.
Some assumptions are crucial, costly, and permanent. Others are trivial, cheap, and reversible. Make it your mission to flesh out assumptions as you determine which is which because that one fleeting lazy assumption can get you stuck in a lakeside palace with pinkish walls.
