The Z Axis

There is a standard defect in human cognition that almost no one corrects for: you cannot see the assumption you are standing on.

You can see everything built on top of it; the choices made, the options, the costs, the history, the elaborate spreadsheet that maps who does what; but the thing underneath, the premise holding the whole structure up, is invisible to you precisely because you are standing on it.

Fish are said to be the last to discover water. Founders are the last to discover the premise running their business.

This is not stupidity. The smartest people have it worst, because they are better at generating sophisticated activity on top of a flawed premise, which buries it deeper. A clever man with a wrong assumption does not sit still; he builds. And every thing he builds becomes another reason not to question the foundation, because now there is more resting on it, more to do, more problems to solve.

Steven Lawson, a founder I admire and a genuinely deep thinker, put it better than I could. Near the end of a conversation he said it had felt as though I'd seen something on a Z axis while he was looking only at the X and the Y.

That is the whole job, described in one line. He was not short of intelligence or information - he had vastly more of both about his own business than I did. He was short of position. He was standing inside (or on) the thing.

So here is the practical question, and it pays to invert it: if you wanted to guarantee you never spotted the real constraint in your own work, what would you do? You would think about it constantly. You would analyse it from every angle you already possessed. You would work harder along the axes you could already see. In other words, you would do exactly what diligent, capable people do, and it would keep the premise safely invisible the entire time.

Effort on the wrong axis is not neutral. It is the very thing that hides the problem. And a hidden problem expends more resources and incurs more opportunity cost.

The rule is simple enough to write on a card: you cannot inspect the assumption you are standing on, so you must borrow the eyes of someone who isn't.

Not for their intelligence.

The outsider's advantage begins with position; he is standing somewhere else, and from there the floor you stand on is plainly just a wall you have agreed to treat as a floor. But position alone is not enough, or every outsider would be useful, and they are plainly not.

Ask most people their outside perspective and they will still miss it: they pattern-match the problem to whatever they happen to be selling, or they "simplify" by hacking off the parts they don't understand, or they hand you a tactic. All had an opportunity to see, and they missed it.

Because seeing the premise, the actual load-bearing assumption, as opposed to the furniture resting on it, is a separate faculty from being clever, and rarer than it looks. It is the willingness to keep looking at a structure until the thing holding it up reveals itself, while having no stake in what that thing turns out to be.

So the rule, corrected, is this: you cannot inspect the assumption you are standing on, so you must borrow the eyes of someone who is not standing on it, and who can actually see foundations rather than furniture. Position makes it possible. Perception makes it useful. The two are not the same, and the second is the scarce one.