The Sleeping Dogs We Wake

On assumptions, safety, and the space between not knowing and not asking

My wife is good at something that she thankfully taught me, though I still have to work at it. She notices when something's off, and instead of guessing, she asks. "You seem like something's on your mind. Do you want to talk about it?" Not "what's wrong." Not "you seem upset today." Just an open door.

She taught me this. For years, I did what I read a lot of people do. I'd notice a shift in mood or energy and quietly build a theory about what it meant. Maybe sometimes I was right. Often I wasn't. This meant I'd spend days operating on a story I had invented instead of one that had been said out loud. Early on, she explained her perspective on this to me. At some point it became a guiding principle between us. When something seems off, we ask. We try not to assume, we check.

It sounds obvious written down. It wasn't obvious to live. But I have come to greatly appreciate the impact this sort of rule has had on us, which extends far beyond our relationship. An assumption articulated stops being an assumption. It becomes an invitation to explore.

Most of what we walk around believing about the people and situations in our lives, we never stated explicitly, likely not even to ourselves. They just don't like me. They're too busy to help. That's just how things are here. None of these stories get tested. We so often just quietly treat them as facts.

It’s not that we don’t care to know the truth. But naming an assumption takes energy most days don't have room for. It means becoming aware of it, leaving autopilot off for long enough to stop and notice. It means framing it explicitly, looking for the right words. It's easier to keep moving on the story we already have than to stop and check whether it's true. It doesn’t seem like a big deal. It looks like a normal Tuesday. The cost shows up later, compounded, hard to trace back to the moment it started.

We probably notice it first in relationships because the feedback loop is short. Say the wrong thing, or don't ask the right one, and we find out fast. Work moves slower, so the same pattern hides longer.

I've spent a lot of my career doing research. If done properly, what research actually does is surface the assumptions a team has stopped noticing it's making. Somebody framed a problem and built a solution. But it might be based on what they assumed customers needed instead of what customers actually needed. It’s the gap between those two things where a lot of failed products live. Rarely because nobody was smart enough. Likely because nobody checked.

Internally, the assumptions get quieter still. They stick around and build up, like stubborn stains on an old pot, because asking about them or addressing them felt like more trouble than living with them. They don’t seem that harmful. Things still work, don’t they?

There's a reason for that. Inside an organization, we stop seeing the water we're swimming in. That's just what familiarity does. Someone coming in from outside asks the obvious question because it isn't obvious to them yet. The rest of us stopped asking it a long time ago.

None of this is really a communication problem. It's a naming problem. Naming an assumption out loud is vulnerable. Asking questions causes the risk of looking like you don't already know. Or it might be seen as questioning something everyone else treats as settled. After all, we shouldn’t wake a sleeping dog, right?

This risk isn't the same for everyone. Ask these questions from a junior seat, or as someone new, and it can read as naive. Ask them from a senior one and it can read as a threat instead, as a challenge to a decision somebody else already owns. Neither reading is really about the question. It's about whether the room offers the interpersonal climate where it feels safe enough to ask.

Amy Edmondson gave that feeling a name decades ago: psychological safety, the belief that you won't be punished for taking an interpersonal risk. Google, with Project Aristotle, went looking for what actually separates its best teams and landed on the same thing, years later and with a mountain of data behind it. Not the smartest people in the room. The rooms where people felt safe enough to challenge each other's assumptions out loud.

That safety doesn't show up on its own. Someone builds it, the same way my wife encouraged our habit of checking on assumptions.

So here's what I keep coming back to. Somewhere close to us right now, in a relationship, a meeting, a plan already underway, there's an assumption nobody's said out loud, and likely more than one.

What is it? Who gets to be the one who asks? And are we creating the right space for it to be asked?