What is FLIP?

Created by management consultant Dennis Geelen, the FLIP Method is a four-step thinking framework designed to help leaders and teams uncover the hidden assumptions shaping how they operate. Rather than beginning with “What new ideas can we brainstorm?”, FLIP starts one level deeper: “What are we assuming is true?” It then helps a team examine the evidence behind that assumption, deliberately reverse it, and test the most promising alternative in a low-risk way.

Why is it needed?

Experience creates expertise, but expertise can also create blind spots. Practices that once worked gradually become accepted rules about customers, employees, competitors, processes and what is possible. Some remain valid. Others may be outdated, untested or simply inherited. When those assumptions stay invisible, they quietly define the boundaries of every solution a team considers.

• Brainstorming can create more ideas without challenging the boundaries around those ideas.

• Familiar assumptions can begin to feel like facts — especially when an industry has operated the same way for years.

• Teams can become very good at optimizing an existing model while overlooking a fundamentally different possibility.

• FLIP creates a repeatable process for questioning assumptions without turning every decision into an abstract debate.

• Small experiments let teams learn before making expensive, disruptive or irreversible commitments.

Where FLIP can be used?

FLIP is intentionally simple enough to use in a leadership conversation, team meeting, strategy session or facilitated workshop — anywhere “the way we’ve always done it” may be limiting what a team can see.

Innovation & growth - Discover new offers, markets, business models and ways of creating value.

Customer experience - Challenge assumptions about what customers want, expect or are willing to do.

Operations - Reconsider inherited processes, policies, handoffs, constraints and measures.

Culture & leadership - Surface shared beliefs about decisions, behaviour and how work gets done.

People & talent - Question assumptions about roles, hiring, motivation, flexibility and performance.

Strategy - Stress-test the beliefs underneath plans before significant resources are committed.

Don’t brainstorm better ideas. FLIP the assumptions behind the old ones.

How the FLIP Method works

FIND - What are we assuming?

Identify the beliefs, rules and “truths” shaping the current approach. Look for language such as “customers always…”, “we have to…”, “our industry never…”, or “that would never work.”

LOOK - What evidence says it’s true?

Separate what is known from what is believed. Examine what supports the assumption, when it was last tested, where it may not hold true, and what evidence might contradict it.

INVERT - What if the opposite were true?

Reverse the assumption deliberately. The purpose is not to claim the opposite is correct; inversion is a thinking device that exposes possibilities the original assumption made difficult to see.

PILOT What’s the smallest way we can test it?

Choose the most promising possibility and design a quick, inexpensive, low-risk experiment. Use the result to learn, refine, scale or discard the idea before making a larger commitment.

Questions that move the conversation

FIND

• What are we assuming must be true for our current approach to make sense?

• What does everyone in our industry seem to accept as a given?

• What do we believe our customers, employees or partners expect from us?

• What have we stopped questioning because “that’s just how it works”?

• What could never change — and why do we believe that?

LOOK

• What evidence actually supports this assumption?

• When was the last time we tested whether it is still true?

• Are we relying on data, experience, convention or someone else’s opinion?

• Where or when does this assumption not appear to be true?

• What evidence would cause us to change our minds?

INVERT

• What if the opposite of this assumption were true?

• If we were starting this business or process today, would we design it this way?

• What would an outsider with no knowledge of our industry try?

• What becomes possible when we temporarily remove this rule or constraint?

• How might a competitor deliberately do the exact opposite?

PILOT

• What is the smallest version of this idea we could test?

• How could we test it without disrupting the entire business?

• What would we need to learn before investing more time or money?

• What result would tell us to continue, change direction or stop?

• Who could we test this with first — one customer, one team, one location or one process?

Bring FLIP to your organization through:

Speaking
An engaging introduction to why hidden assumptions limit innovation — and how FLIP gives people a practical way to challenge them.

Workshops
A hands-on session where your team applies FLIP to a real challenge, opportunity, or stubborn problem inside your organization.

Advisory
Focused support for leaders and teams who want to use FLIP to rethink a specific strategy, process, customer experience, or opportunity.

Your next breakthrough might be hiding behind an assumption nobody has questioned yet.

What assumptions are hiding inside your organization?

Every team has them.

Assumptions about customers.
About competitors.
About how work gets done.
About what employees want.
About what’s possible — and what isn’t.

FLIP helps teams uncover those assumptions, challenge the ones that may no longer be true, and turn new possibilities into practical experiments.

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