Breaking the Usual Frame
Better Question: What if you turned it upside down?
I love conversations that stay with you after they’re over, like the warmth on your hands after cradling a hot drink.
I recently had one of these conversations with a longtime collaborator after he reached out to catch up and share ideas.
He’s leading the marketing efforts at a growing nonprofit. That’s required getting buy-in, building trust, and cultivating the right team to get the work done, plus, of course, doing all of that work.
The big task on the docket is a website overhaul.
Now, if you’ve never had the pleasure of participating in a website overhaul, boy are you lucky. If you have, you know that it’s akin to capturing lightning in a bottle without getting too burned. Inevitably someone remains unhappy, and you’re exhausted (and if you’re me, you’ve sworn never to do it again).
He walked through his plan for the project, and I concurred with his approach: “Yes, I always do the homepage last because you don’t really know what to put there until you’ve fleshed out the rest of the site. If you do it last, you avoid having to build it twice.”
I left with a nagging feeling that I was missing a strategic opportunity.
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What if you turned it upside down?
Photographer Charles H. Traub posited, “If all else fails, turn it upside down, and if it looks good, it might work.”
He intended this advice to inspire photographers. These creatively-minded people take a lens and frame a moment. What they choose to include and not include shapes our understanding. How they compose what lives inside the frame does as well.
It’s easy to get comfortable with how certain things should and should not look based on our taste as well as our experience. Our brains crave the comfortable groove of the expected because it’s more efficient. The familiar loses its friction. It ceases to hold our attention or provoke a feeling. It dissolves into expected, albeit pleasant, background noise.
We do the same thing when we approach projects. We either rely on best practices because we assume they’re called that for a reason1 or we rely on our experience to tell us that this is the best way to do this thing.
If we never question our approach, we’re likely to miss opportunities.
When Traub asks us to turn the image upside down, he isn’t only suggesting a new angle. He is forcing the brain to abandon its comfortable frame. We can no longer rely on what we expect; we have to look at the raw relationships of form, light, and shadow.
Doing so allows us to understand what we’re considering more deeply. In some cases, you’ll even find that there’s a better way.
Putting it into practice →
For those seeking a deliberate life, the flip upside down acts as a filter. What do you see? Does it look good? Why? What does that mean?
Rather than accepting the path of no friction, you can use this question to check your assumptions. If nothing else, it will reveal things you didn’t consider and strengthen your version of right-side up.
For a business, one of the greatest risks is working from an outdated mental model of the world. Asking, “What if we turned it upside down?” may force you to confront uncomfortable possibilities about how the world works — and how you might strategically interact with it.
The inversion exercise isn’t about blowing things up; it’s about stress-testing your conviction. It exposes whether you are acting on strategy or habit.
When I asked this question about the website project, it challenged my conviction that you do the homepage last. In the case of a large site, it may be wiser to do the homepage and a few key landing pages so that the world can keep turning while the deep work gets done. Each section of deep work can touch back to the appropriate landing page and/or homepage for a tweak before starting another pass at a different area.
While it will result in multiple touches to those original pages, it embraces rather than fights the reality that the world remains in motion while you work on the project.
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Hi! I’m Katie
In addition to writing this newsletter, I speak, cultivate a community, and work directly with teams. Here’s how you can work with me:
Community: Join The Glaede, a refuge for those who find deep thinking essential — and fun. It’s a space to engage with curious minds who will expand your perspective.
Speaking: Bring me in to challenge assumptions and explore frameworks to think more strategically.
Teams: Work with me 1-on-1 at Point:Value to ask the right questions and evolve your value.
Not sure where to start? Meet with me and we’ll unite that knot together.
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Assuming that there’s one best way that will work in every situation is generally a poor strategic choice. That doesn’t mean that you should ignore the wisdom of what’s come before, as it can save you time and mental effort.