Assumption Surfacing

topic

Assumption surfacing is the creative perceptual practice of making visible the invisible assumptions embedded in a current framing, design, argument, or practice — perceiving what has been taken for granted, what has been left unexamined, and what has been treated as necessary that is actually contingent — revealing the assumed background against which foreground choices are made and creating the possibility of questioning assumptions that unexamined acceptance treats as given.

Role

Assumption surfacing is the creative perception skill that most directly enables paradigm-level innovation — because assumptions operate as constraints on the space of imaginable solutions only while they remain unperceived, and the moment they are made visible they become available for examination, challenge, and potential elimination. Most of the most significant creative breakthroughs in science, technology, and art consisted in the identification and rejection of assumptions that had been invisible precisely because they were universal — with the discovery that the earth moves, that space is not absolute, that species are not fixed, and that the unconscious shapes behavior all representing the creative perception of assumptions so pervasive that they had never been questioned.

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