Principles

Most companies do not suffer from a lack of knowledge.

Leaders have experience.

Employees have professional skills.

The internet offers an endless supply of management books, courses, research, models, and AI-generated recommendations.

There is more knowledge than ever before.

Yet companies still get stuck with the same problems.

Sales are not growing.

The product is not finding the right customer.

Projects are late.

People do not take responsibility.

Software systems do not work together.

The founder is overloaded.

The problem is not always that the company does not know enough.

The problem may be a single untested assumption that the entire organisation treats as fact.

If that assumption is wrong, the company builds the wrong strategy, the wrong processes, the wrong roles, and the wrong metrics around it.

More knowledge will not fix such a company.

The false premise must be removed first.

Every company is built on assumptions

A company has to make decisions before it has complete certainty.

It assumes that:

• a particular customer has an important problem;
• the customer is willing to pay for the solution;
• the chosen channel reaches the right buyer;
• the proposed price covers the cost of acquiring and serving the customer;
• people can handle their roles;
• the work process can withstand greater volume;
• the software being used supports the company’s work;
• the chosen strategy will lead to the desired outcome.

This is a natural part of business.

The problem begins when a hypothesis quietly becomes a truth.

No one remembers why the original decision was made.

Market conditions change, but the assumption remains.

New employees learn it as a fact about how the organisation operates.

After a while, the company is no longer building its system around today’s reality.

It is defending an old supposition.

A false assumption can be a very simple sentence

A company’s most expensive mistakes do not always sound like complex strategic theories.

They may be simple sentences:

“The customer wants more features.”

“We need more sales.”

“The price is too high.”

“The market is not ready.”

“No one but the founder can make this decision.”

“Our service has to be fully personalised.”

“Employees do not want to take responsibility.”

“We need new software.”

“This customer generates too much revenue for us to let them go.”

“If we hire more people, the workload will disappear.”

Each of these statements may be true.

But if it has not been tested, it is an assumption.

When the whole company begins acting on it, the impact of one sentence becomes enormous.

A false assumption begins producing perfectly logical decisions

That is precisely why the problem is difficult to notice.

A highly professional company can be built on a false assumption.

If management believes customers want more features, it is logical to hire developers and expand product development.

If the sales problem is believed to stem from insufficient activity, it is logical to measure call volume, buy more contacts, and introduce sales automation.

If people are believed not to take responsibility, it is logical to increase control and the number of approvals.

If every customer is believed to need a bespoke solution, it is logical to build a more flexible process and hire more project managers.

All the subsequent decisions may be internally consistent.

The original assumption may still be wrong.

The company no longer sees the problem because the entire system confirms its own premise.

More knowledge can even reinforce a false assumption

If a company believes it needs more sales, it commissions sales training.

If it believes it needs better marketing, it hires an agency.

If it believes employees are not sufficiently motivated, it organises a motivation programme.

Every new expert receives a brief that already contains the company’s own diagnosis.

“Help us grow sales.”

“Help people take more responsibility.”

“Help us choose new software.”

The consultant begins solving the problem they were given.

But what if sales should not be increased yet because every new customer increases the loss?

What if employees cannot take responsibility because every decision belongs to the leader?

What if no new software is needed because the problem lies in an unclear process?

More knowledge applied to the wrong problem definition merely makes the company better at doing the wrong thing.

The first diagnosis is often only a symptom

The client usually describes what they see.

The website does not work.

Development has stalled.

Sales are not growing.

Projects are late.

People cannot cope.

The leader has to do everything personally.

These are real problems, but they are not necessarily root causes.

The website may be technically sound, but the value proposition may be unclear.

Development may be blocked not by code but by a priority decision that has not been made.

Sales may be weak because the company is targeting the wrong customer.

Projects may be late because sales gives delivery an incomplete brief.

People may appear weak because accountability and decision-making authority sit in different places.

The leader may have to do everything because they have taught the organisation that no one else’s decision is final.

Good consulting does not begin by immediately fixing the visible symptom.

First, it must find the sentence whose acceptance as truth keeps causing the symptom to return.

A false assumption can be part of the company’s identity

Some assumptions are difficult to test because they concern the company’s understanding of itself.

“Our strength is personalised service.”

“We have always been a product development company.”

“The founder knows the customer best.”

“Standardisation is impossible in our industry.”

“Our customers do not buy online.”

These statements may once have created the company’s first success.

That is why they are no longer treated as hypotheses.

They are part of the company’s story.

Questioning them feels like an attack on the company’s identity, previous decisions, or its leaders’ experience.

But the market is not bound by the company’s identity.

When customer needs, technology, or competition change, the company’s understanding of what actually creates its strength must change as well.

Yesterday’s truth may be today’s constraint.

A false assumption is defended by the entire organisation

An assumption does not live only in a leader’s head.

Around it emerge:

• positions;
• departments;
• budgets;
• software systems;
• processes;
• metrics;
• customer contracts;
• people’s competencies;
• leaders’ influence and position.

If the core assumption is questioned, a large part of the existing structure may lose its justification.

That is why the organisation finds many good reasons to continue with the old logic.

Customers are waiting.

The systems are not ready.

People need time.

Now is not the right moment.

Too much has already been invested.

All these arguments may be valid.

But they answer the question of why change is difficult.

They do not prove that the old assumption is still correct.

The value of an outsider is not a better opinion

A consultant’s value should not lie in speaking more confidently than the leader.

An outsider does not automatically have better answers.

Their advantage is that they have not yet become accustomed to the company’s assumptions.

They can ask:

• Why do you serve this particular customer?
• How do you know the customer needs this?
• Why must this process take place in this order?
• Why must the leader approve this decision?
• Why do you use this particular software for this work?
• What proves that the employee is the problem?
• What would happen if you stopped this activity entirely?
• Would you start the same project again today?

Inside the company, these questions may seem too simple.

But the answer to a simple question may reveal that the entire system operates according to an old or untested assumption.

My work does not begin with giving recommendations

I do not assume that the company is missing yet another management model or a long list of possible improvements.

First, I want to understand what outcome the company wants and what is truly constraining it.

To do that, I combine three things:

• extensive business and IT experience;
• knowledge of patterns that recur across different companies;
• purpose-built analytical tools that quickly make the company’s background, business logic, processes, and potential bottlenecks visible.

Software helps consolidate information and generate hypotheses.

Experience helps distinguish symptoms from causes.

Conversation with the leader reveals which parts of the visible picture correspond to reality.

The goal is not to prove that I know more about the company than its leader does.

The goal is to find the question that people inside the company no longer know how, or are no longer willing, to ask.

Removing one false assumption can change many outcomes at once

If a company discovers that the problem is not sales activity but the wrong customer, all of the following change at once:

• target audience;
• value proposition;
• marketing message;
• sales channel;
• pricing;
• product priorities;
• customer service work.

If it becomes clear that people are not avoiding responsibility but lack decision-making authority, the following change:

• the leader’s role;
• approval chains;
• decision-making speed;
• employee autonomy;
• leaders’ workload;
• organisational structure.

If it becomes clear that the company needs a clear process rather than new software, the following may disappear:

• duplicate data entry;
• manual checking;
• the need for integration;
• some licensing costs;
• a large development project.

One corrected assumption can change an entire sequence of subsequent decisions.

That is why one good consultation can be far more valuable than months of general analysis.

A false assumption must be tested with a small experiment

A consultant’s opinion does not become true simply because it sounds good.

A new diagnosis is also only a hypothesis at first.

It must be tested with the smallest and fastest experiment possible.

If we believe the problem is the wrong customer segment, we test the offer with another clearly selected customer.

If we believe decision-making is the bottleneck, we move decision-making authority closer to the work in a limited area.

If we believe the process creates unnecessary work, we remove one step and measure the impact.

If we believe customer support is dealing with a product-driven problem, we fix one recurring cause and see whether the number of enquiries falls.

A good experiment states:

• which assumption is being tested;
• which outcome must change;
• how long the experiment will last;
• which result will confirm the new understanding;
• what we will do if the assumption was wrong.

The goal is not to replace an old belief with a new one.

The goal is to reach evidence on which a better decision can be based.

Good consulting reduces complexity

Bad consulting can leave a company with:

• more frameworks;
• more metrics;
• more working groups;
• more projects;
• more documents;
• more activities to carry out alongside existing work.

Everything may be well justified.

The company itself becomes more complex.

Good consulting should be able to remove something.

A false assumption.

An unnecessary activity.

The wrong customer.

Excessive control.

A broken process step.

Pointless software.

A project that should not continue.

The more precisely the real problem is identified, the smaller the necessary solution can be.

The outcome of consulting is not knowledge but a changed decision

The client does not need knowledge merely to learn something interesting.

They need a better decision.

What should be abandoned?

What should change?

Who must be accountable?

Which system should be fixed?

Which work should be automated?

Which customer should be chosen?

Which assumption must be tested immediately?

If the company continues after the consultation with the same work, the same budget, the same roles, and the same metrics, the knowledge created did not have enough impact.

After good consulting, something must change in the company’s actual way of working.

Never only in a presentation.

How can you find the company’s most dangerous assumption?

The leadership team could ask:

1. Which statement do we take so completely for granted that we no longer test it?

1. Which assumption supports the greatest amount of cost, people, and processes?

1. Which important outcome has not improved despite a great deal of work?

1. What do we believe about the customer without the customer having proved it through purchasing behaviour?

1. Which problem do we keep solving, only for it always to return?

1. Which activity feels unthinkable to stop even though its value has not been assessed recently?

1. What would we do differently if we were starting from scratch with what we know today?

The most valuable assumption to test is not always the most uncertain one.

It is the assumption whose being wrong would have the greatest impact on the company.

The best consultant does not make the client dependent on them

A consultant’s value does not lie in the company needing them for every subsequent decision.

The best outcome is for the leadership team to see its own company more clearly after the intervention and make better decisions from then on.

A consultant should help:

• make assumptions visible;
• distinguish fact from opinion;
• identify the most consequential untested assumption;
• design a small test;
• make a decision based on the result;
• embed the new logic in the company’s process.

This gives the client more than a single answer.

It gives them a better way to view their own company.

Companies do not get stuck only because they lack knowledge

They also get stuck in knowledge that was once correct but no longer is.

Or in a belief that was never truly tested.

When enough of the company has been built around that belief, the entire organisation begins defending it.

Then another training course, new software, or a longer action plan will not help.

The false premise must be removed first.

The best consulting does not necessarily give the company more to do.

It helps the company stop work it would never have started had the right assumption been in place.

If your company is doing a great deal of work but the same problem keeps returning, you may not be lacking knowledge.

The entire company may be answering the wrong question with great professionalism.

Mikk Orglaan

Challeng.ist