---
title: "How Innovation Happens — Lesson #24: Audit Your Assumptions"
canonical: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/11/how-innovation-happens-lesson-024/
updated: 2026-10-28T10:13:17+00:00
---

# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #24: Audit Your Assumptions

![How Innovation Happens — Lesson #24: Audit Your Assumptions](https://jimcarroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/How_Innovation_Happens_Lesson_024.jpg)

*I’ve been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I’ve discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next.*

*“Assumptions are dangerous illusions that bind us to an unsuccessful future.”*

I’ve come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next.

In a world of exponential change, what you think you know can become your greatest liability.

Assumptions are efficient. They let us make decisions without re-examining everything from scratch. But when markets, technology or customer behaviour accelerate, those shortcuts expire faster.

The problem is that expired assumptions rarely announce themselves. They continue to feel like facts.

That is why assumption auditing should be a formal leadership discipline. Strategy should not only ask, “What do we believe?” It should ask, “When did we last prove it?”

So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start.

**Action Items:**

- Write down the five assumptions your current strategy depends on most.

- Put a date beside the last time each was tested.

- Choose one assumption to actively try to disprove this quarter.

Explore the full [How Innovation Happens series](https://jimcarroll.com/category/how-innovation-happens/).

## Real-World Examples

*These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world.*

### London transport: The fare gate did not have to read a special card

For years, London travelers paid with Oyster, a dedicated transit card engineered around the limitations of late-1990s networks. Each reader performed fare calculations quickly enough to keep buses and station gates moving. That architecture worked remarkably well, but it also made a specialized transit credential feel like a permanent part of public transportation.

Transport for London reconsidered the underlying assumption: why must the traveler carry a transit-issued card at all? Contactless bank cards could provide a payment credential, with the fare calculation handled through a different back-office model. The architectural challenge was to preserve reliable boarding and fare capping while changing what the system treated as essential.

Contactless payment began on London buses in December 2012 and expanded across the Tube and much of the network in September 2014. The London Transport Museum notes that other major cities later adopted comparable models. The transition did not make Oyster disappear, but it fundamentally expanded the ways riders could enter the system.

This was an assumption audit carried out in infrastructure. It did not start by asking how to improve the appearance of an Oyster card. It asked why the travel experience should depend on one proprietary object in the first place.

**Why it matters:** The most productive assumption to challenge is often the component everyone has stopped noticing.

**Sources:**

### UPS ORION: The familiar delivery route was not necessarily the best one

Delivery drivers develop valuable local knowledge. They learn building entrances, traffic habits and reliable sequences of stops. The danger comes when experience becomes an unquestioned assumption: that a familiar route must be the most efficient route, or that improving a national delivery network is mainly a matter of asking each driver to work a little harder.

UPS began developing its ORION route-optimization system in 2003. Rather than rely solely on inherited delivery patterns, the system used route data and algorithms to recommend efficient sequences, taking distance, time, vehicle behavior and operating constraints into account. It emerged from more than a decade of development and staged deployment.

A U.S. Federal Highway Administration case summary described a goal of reducing annual travel by 100 million miles, with estimated savings in fuel, emissions and operating costs. Those are UPS estimates reported in the government case, not an independent measurement of every route. Nevertheless, the change in problem definition is unmistakable.

The company was not merely improving navigation. It was treating thousands of seemingly settled daily decisions as choices that could be recomputed with better evidence. That is the operational power of asking which assumptions remain true because they have been tested, and which survive because nobody challenges them.

**Why it matters:** Institutional experience is valuable evidence, but it should compete with new evidence rather than veto it.

**Sources:**

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