It's rare but fantastic when people from different disciplines run into each others' assumptions and meet them with curiosity, not rejection.

In my case, I was so thankful to a private equity professional with whom I worked on an investment deal:

One moment, we were working through the practicalities of a business case. The next, we suddenly ran headlong into each others' assumptions. Simplifying a bit:

Him: "Hey Steffen, what assumptions do you need in the financial model?"

Me: "None. I have no assumptions."

Him: "Huh?"

Me: "🤷‍♂️"

For a second, we just looked at each. Then, he had the presence of mind and curiosity to steer us into a good direction: "Wait, why?" he asked.

So we discussed it. And it turned out we each had good but very different assumptions based on the needs of our job:

In his world of buying and selling businesses, managing directors "have a vision for what the financials 'should be.' It's then the team's job to make the numbers work to get there." The point of the numbers is to create a narrative that makes an investment case either attractive or not. The numbers may not end up being "right." But everybody knows that. When you buy and sell companies, you can't get to "right." You can get to "plausible," "believable" and, most importantly, "attractive even if we are wrong."

In my world of building businesses, numbers are just placeholders. They help us to identify the assumptions that are both (1) big enough to make or break the entire business case and (2) unknown enough that we can't tell yet whether they will make ... or break the business case. (I don't really worry about big but fairly certain assumptions. We can treat those like facts.)

To close the conversation before we returned to building our model, I generalized the point into a principle for him:

As innovation leaders, we offer facts where we can and assumptions that we can replace with facts where we can't.

Or, even more generally, we serve clients' best interests, not their expectations.

Whether people like what we offer them or not doesn't matter. Nor does it matter whether we get our insights from orthodox or unusual sources. We just offer the best guidance toward building businesses that we can.

In a word, our job is to be useful.