The Most Dangerous Assumptions Are the Ones That Work

The Store We Never Questioned

I can still remember Friday nights at Blockbuster like they weren't all that long ago. If you wanted to watch a movie back then, that's simply where you went. There wasn't much question about it. The parking lot was usually full. People wandered up and down the aisles hunting for the latest releases. Every so often somebody would get all the way to the counter only to find out the movie they came in for was already rented.

Nobody seemed bothered by any of it, because that's how renting a movie worked, and none of us knew to want anything else. At the time it never once occurred to me that the whole thing might be temporary. Blockbuster felt as permanent to me as the grocery store or the gas station on the corner. It had become part of the landscape, and once something becomes part of the landscape, you stop asking why it's even there.

Reading about Netflix and its early years brought all those Friday nights right back. While Blockbuster was busy opening more stores and getting better at running the ones it already had, Netflix was off asking a different question. It wasn't trying to build a better video store. It was trying to make the simple act of watching a movie easier than it had ever been. It's a surprisingly easy thing to confuse a familiar method with the actual problem that method was invented to solve.

The Question That Changed Everything

Blockbuster set out to help people rent movies. Netflix became focused on helping people watch them. At first glance those two ideas sound almost the same. Sit with them a little longer, though, and you start to see they're built on completely different assumptions underneath. The first one assumes the store is always going to be part of the experience. The second treats the store as just one possible way of getting people to the outcome they actually wanted all along.

I've watched this exact thing play out in planning meetings more times than I care to admit. A team will spend a solid hour making an event or a presentation or a piece of content better and better, right up until somebody finally stops and asks whether we're even solving the right problem. Nobody ever answers that one right away. What happens instead is that people slowly start looking at the whole thing a little differently than they were a minute earlier.

I've come to appreciate those moments, mostly because they don't come along very often. They require somebody to stop improving the accepted answer long enough to go back and reconsider the question that created it.

When I look back on all of it now, I don't think Netflix won because it built a better video store than Blockbuster. I think it won because it stopped treating the video store as the answer at all.

What Success Can Hide

Here's something I've noticed again and again. Success has a way of making certain decisions disappear on you. The longer something keeps working, the more natural and inevitable it starts to feel, until eventually it gets hard to remember that somebody once sat down and chose to do it that way. That's a big part of why the Blockbuster story still interests me. That company wasn't failing because nobody cared about it. Customers were still coming through the doors right up to the end.

The stores were still busy on a Friday night. From the outside, it looked like exactly the kind of business we all just assume will be around forever. That very success is what made the next chapter so hard for anyone to see coming.

These days, whenever I drive past a building I know used to be a Blockbuster, I catch myself asking what feels just as permanent to me right now as that store once did. Somewhere out there, somebody is looking at a familiar business or industry or assumption the rest of us take for granted, and they're asking a question about it that hasn't even crossed our minds yet. The unsettling part is that I have no way of knowing who that person is, and neither did Blockbuster.