Easy-to-process things feel truer, safer, and more appealing.
More quotes“Restaurants have menus.” Do they?
Remove the menu and all sorts of possibilities crawl out: market-led dishes, a chef’s choice, a conversation about appetite, one magnificent thing cooked until it sells out. Most are commercially daft. That is fine. The absurdity has already earned its lunch by making the convention visible.
Try another. “Customers contact support.” Turn it over and you get a service that notices trouble first. “Taxi companies own cars” once sounded like a fact too. Somewhere, someone is currently defending the next obsolete habit as if Moses brought it down from procurement on a stone tablet.
Reversal is a crowbar, not a crystal ball. “Banks have no money” remains inconvenient, and the existence of one platform business does not turn every opposite into venture capital. The question is which part customers genuinely value and which part survives because the category keeps photocopying itself.
Write down five “facts” from the brief. Reverse each one. Laugh at the rubbish. Then ask what would have to change for the opposite to become useful: technology, trust, audience, price, timing.
Keep the mechanism that emerges. Throw away the literal idea if necessary. Training after work might become guidance inside the task. A call centre might become a product that prevents the call. Fresh answers rarely grow downstream of stale assumptions. Make the obvious sentence show its passport.