Ibn Tufayl, the twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher, wrote a novel — arguably the first philosophical novel — about a child raised in total isolation who nonetheless reconstructs the entire structure of rational knowledge through pure observation and experiment. The book is called *Hayy ibn Yaqzan*, and its business implication is stranger than it sounds: first-principles thinking is not a methodology you apply, it's a condition you have to manufacture by deliberately stripping away the social consensus that tells you what counts as obvious. The real cost of operating inside an established industry isn't competition or regulation — it's that everyone around you, including your smartest colleagues, has already agreed on what the problem is. They've agreed so thoroughly they've stopped noticing the agreement. Ibn Tufayl's insight, and the thing Amazon, IKEA, and every genuine category-creator stumbled onto by accident, is that the unit of competitive advantage isn't a better answer to the shared question — it's the discovery that the shared question was wrong. The practical move isn't a retreat into isolation, but a scheduled one: a meeting with no legacy framing allowed, where the only permitted opening is 'what are we assuming everyone already knows?'
Name the assumption your team treats as too obvious to state — then trace where it came from.
Drawing from Islamic / Andalusian rationalist philosophy — Ibn Tufayl (Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl)
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