Assumption Inversion

What this technique does

Every approach rests on a stack of unstated beliefs — about who the user is, what they value, how the thing gets delivered, in what order, at what price. List those beliefs, flip each one into its opposite, then ask the sharp question: where is the flipped version already true? Most flips are dead ends, and naming them dead is part of the work. The two or three flips that turn out to be true somewhere are where a non-obvious direction hides — the incumbents never looked there because the original belief felt like a law of nature.

Source: the classical dialectic method of arguing a position by its negation; popularized for business by "invert, always invert" (Carl Jacobi, via Charlie Munger) and by Edward de Bono's reversal method in Lateral Thinking (1970).

Workflow

Step 1: Confirm the target

A valid target is a design, plan, or approach whose assumptions you can list: a product strategy, a go-to-market plan, a pricing model, a workflow you are about to build, an onboarding sequence. If the target is unclear, ask one focused question — "What's the current approach, and what feels locked-in about it?"

Refuse requests to perform analytical work — debugging, reviewing code, implementing a change — and suggest an analytical approach instead. Redesigning or ideating about such a process is a valid creative target: "reinvent our code-review ritual" is in scope; "review this PR" is not.

Step 2: Extract the assumptions

List 5–8 assumptions behind the current approach. Aim for the load-bearing ones, not decorations. These prompt categories help you cover the space rather than list five versions of the same belief: