#ThinkfullyHabit: Assume nothing
How do you check if your assumptions are true or not? Even the best experts in the most critical of situations can fail to check assumptions.
Take the incident at NASA, known as ‘the scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history.’ On July 16th, 2013, Luca Parmitano and his fellow astronaut Chris Cassady went out on their second spacewalk together. 45 minutes in, Parmitano felt water at the back of his head. He didn’t know where it was coming from. The command was given to terminate the spacewalk early. On the way back to the airlock the water in his helmet shifted, blocking his eyes and nose and he was at risk of drowning. Back in the airlock, for a few agonising minutes while the chamber re-pressurised it was unclear whether he would survive. Once it was finally safe to remove his helmet, nearly 1.5 litres of water came out. He was alive. This near fatal incident could have been avoided if a simple assumption had been challenged.
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”
WHY?
Assumptions constantly need checking because they are so easy to make. One week earlier, after Parmitano returned from his first spacewalk, he removed his helmet and noticed a few drops of water inside. He raised the issue and talked it over with those on the ground but everyone made the assumption that it was a leak from the bag of drinking water located inside his suit. As a precaution, they replaced the water bag and didn’t look any deeper into it. Despite all the expertise of the crew on the space station and the experts on the ground this assumption wasn’t checked. In fact, there was no discussion of the water in the helmet during the briefings leading up to the second spacewalk one week later. At the time, the amount of water in the helmet made it easy to accept a leaking water bag as the likely explanation. They had all settled prematurely on the first explanation, which was in fact wrong.
A subsequent investigation was launched into the incident. The report made it clear that there was no reason behind the assumption made and highlighted how no one challenged the assumption or investigated it further. It declared that, “had that conclusion been challenged, the issue would likely have been discovered prior to [the spacewalk] and the mishap would have been avoided.” The leak actually came about as a result of a failed part in the suit - a fan pump separator. Chris Hansen, the chair of the Investigation Board realised that to avoid ‘the scariest wardrobe malfunction in NASA history’, the only question people had to ask was, ‘How do you know the drink bag leaked?’ Any answer given wouldn’t have been sufficient and would have raised a red flag. But no one asked, so no one checked.
How to check assumptions? Here’s the questions to ask:
- How do you know?
- What leads you to that assumption and why do you think it’s correct?
- What might happen if it’s wrong?
- What are the uncertainties in your analysis?
- I understand the advantages in your recommendation, what are the disadvantages?
Expertise doesn't safeguard us against assumptions. Even when we have the highest levels of expertise we remain prone and the questions remain vital. If the NASA crew had asked any of these questions, or ones similar, it would probably have been enough to challenge the assumption about the water leak. These questions are probably all that’s needed to challenge your own assumptions or the assumptions of those around you. The tip is to nip assumptions in the bud early; long before they lead to bigger consequences.
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