Assumption Inversion

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:

• The user — who they are, what they already know, what they can be trusted to do.
• The value — what the thing is actually worth, and to whom.
• The channel — where it reaches people and where they meet it.
• The sequence — what has to happen first, second, last.
• The price — who pays, how much, and when.
• The effort split — who does the work, the provider or the user.

Step 3: Flip each assumption

Turn each assumption into its strongest plausible opposite — not a strawman. "Users want it fast" flips to "users want it slow and deliberate," not "users want it broken." A good flip is one a reasonable person could defend. If the flip is obviously stupid, you flipped it lazily; find the version a competitor could actually build a business on.

Step 4: Hunt for where the flip is true

For each flip, ask the load-bearing question: "In what market, segment, or era is this flip TRUE? Who profits from it today?" Name a real place it holds — a customer type, an industry, a historical moment, an existing product. If you cannot name one honestly, the flip is dead. Say so and move on. Do not manufacture a fake "where."

Step 5: Develop the survivors

Take the 2–3 flips that had a live answer in Step 4 and develop them into concrete directions. What would the approach look like if you built it around the flipped belief? Where the flip already works for someone else, borrow the mechanism.

Step 6: Meta-pattern scan