What assumptions make…
When you’re a technology evangelist working in a field that’s at best slow to change and at worst suspiciously resistant to it; it’s easy to accuse the late majority and laggards of basing their objections on assumptions. Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users says it well:
half my battles… were about questioning assumptions… many of which had been around long enough to be science fair projects… When you’re stuck with the inertia of outdated assumptions, you’re stuck with incremental (not revolutionary) improvements.
I hear it all the time, “we tried that before and it didn’t work” When? 20 years ago? Or “This is what the students want; I know because I help them.” I want to challenge this with, “well, they want it because you’ve just told them they want it. The goal here is to provide them with something they understand immediately and not have to ask for help.” But I don’t. It smacks to closely of asking someone to prove nonexistance… It quickly becomes a battle wills. My assumptions against their’s. And let’s face it, I’m the scrappy upstart with an attitude and we lose when it comes down to credibility and big guns. So, when advocating for change that will impact others, both sides have their assumptions and to be successful it’s up to me to demonstrate how it is worth it.
I’ve often wondered something similar while working at my public library’s reference desk. We track statistics on the number of questions asked, type of question, etc. Sometimes there’s a day with only ten or twenty reference questions (which is a slow day for us), yet I’ll look around and the library is full – most computers in use, comfortable chairs and work tables occupied, etc.
From the people I help (or from the people who complain), I get some idea of how we’re doing providing service and services. But it seems that the vast majority of patrons only interact with library staff to check books in and out, if they interact with us at all. So if we don’t get input from most people, how will we ever know if we’re doing a good job or providing them with what they want or need?
And, on the subject of proving non-existence: it is quite an easy thing to do, as Douglas Adams shows in The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy. To sum up: based on our own solar system, we know that life does not exist on every planet. Therefore, life is finite. However, since the entire universe is infinite, that means there is an infinite number of planets. So, find out how much life there is in the universe (by calculating the average amount of life per planet), we just divide the number of planets with life on them (a finite number) by the total number of planets (an infinite number). However, dividing a finite number by infinity equals zero – thus, there is no life in the universe, and so life does not existence in the universe. And if life does not exist, then certainly the needs of patrons do not exist, and my job just got a whole lot easier. Isn’t that wonderful?