A recent Jes­sica Hagy Dia­gram caught my inter­est (do the ol’ click-to-enlarge thing), remind­ing me of things I’ve said before about think­ing dif­fer­ently and chal­leng­ing assump­tions. It’s an impor­tant process and one I fancy as a kind of spe­cialty of mine. In approach­ing any chal­lenge, I’m con­tin­u­ally try­ing to see it from a dif­fer­ent angle in order to get the nec­es­sary per­spec­tive to see the solu­tion, whether it’s con­ven­tional or not. Along these lines, the other day Seth Godin wrote about the sci­en­tific method,

If you enter a con­ver­sa­tion look­ing for some­thing to test, mea­sure and ulti­mately change, it's likely you'll find it. That change makes you more com­pet­i­tive, and you con­tinue to cycle past your com­peti­tors. On the other hand, if you enter a con­ver­sa­tion con­cerned about main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo, it's likely that this is exactly what you're going to do.

He sug­gests that while a nat­ural impulse might be a defen­sive pos­ture toward chal­lenges, it is bet­ter to “Ask your­self, ‘what do I believe that’s wrong? How can I change the way I do things? What works? What doesn’t?’”

This is the kind of think­ing that helps hone every facet of your busi­ness… not a knee-jerk defense of every­thing you’ve done, but con­tin­u­ing to chal­lenge it to be sure you have done it the best way that you can. And, of course, chang­ing what­ever needs chang­ing. Don’t imag­ine that all your assump­tions are cor­rect, even the ones you’ve already acted upon. Be pre­pared to change a wrong deci­sion even after it’s made. Being will­ing to admit mis­takes and even cut your losses when nec­es­sary helps keep your mind open enough to see what you’ve been missing.