The assumption you inherited from a job you left in 2019

A chief operating officer told me his company never discounted. He said it the way you state a physical constant. When I asked where the rule came from, he thought for a while and said it was from a business he had left seven years earlier, where discounting had nearly destroyed the brand.

That business sold luxury goods to consumers. His current one sells software to procurement departments who consider a list price an opening position. He had been holding the line on a policy imported wholesale from an industry with the opposite dynamics, and everybody below him had learned it as a value.

Why inherited assumptions are the hard ones

A belief you argued yourself into can be argued out of. You remember the reasoning, so you can inspect it.

An inherited assumption has no reasoning attached. It arrives as knowledge, usually from a formative experience where it was correct, and it works its way into the category of things too obvious to state. That is exactly why it never comes up: nobody debates the premises, and this is now a premise.

They are also socially protected. Assumptions travel with the person who carries them, and once that person is senior, questioning the assumption looks like questioning them. The organisation stops probing it long before the assumption stops being wrong.

The dangerous belief is not the one you defend. It is the one you have never had to.

Three questions that surface them

Where did I learn this. Not what do I believe, but when did I first believe it, and what was true then. Most inherited assumptions can be dated to a specific job, a specific failure or a specific boss, and dating one is usually enough to loosen it.

What would have to change for this to stop being true. If you cannot describe the conditions under which the rule would be wrong, you are not holding a judgment, you are holding an article of faith. Real rules of thumb have edges.

Who disagrees, and are they still here. New joiners see inherited assumptions clearly for roughly four months, then they acclimatise. If you have somebody in that window, they are the most valuable diagnostic instrument in the building, and they will not volunteer it unless you ask directly.

Doing this without dismantling everything

There is a failure mode on the other side, and it is worse. A team that decides to question all its premises produces months of interesting conversation and no decisions.

Be selective. Surface the assumptions that are load-bearing for a decision that is actually live and actually stuck. If the belief is not carrying weight in a real choice this quarter, leave it alone. The point is not intellectual hygiene, it is unsticking a specific thing.

And write the surfaced assumption down next to the decision, in plain language, with the evidence you have for it now rather than the evidence you had in 2019. Half the time it holds and you proceed with more confidence than before. The other half it does not, and you have just found the reason the decision would not move.

The COO ran a discounting pilot on one segment. It did not damage the brand. It closed two deals that had been sitting for a year, and he stopped saying never.