We rarely take the obvious route. Not because we enjoy making things difficult, but because the obvious route has usually been walked before. We like to start by taking things apart, pulling at assumptions, following the new tangents, asking the questions that feel almost too simple or almost too weird. It gets messy. That's kind of the point.

At some point, the pieces start to come back together. A direction emerges. Something clicks that wouldn't have clicked if we'd gone straight from A to B. That's the part we live for, that moment when thinking sideways suddenly moves everything forward.

In practice, that means we mix methods the way a good cook raids the pantry. Design thinking to stay close to the actual human problem. Lateral techniques to shake loose the assumptions that sneak in uninvited. Analogies borrowed from completely unrelated fields, because sometimes the best answer to a business problem is hiding inside a biology textbook or a sound fragment. We connect dots that don't obviously belong together — and then we check if the connection holds.

We are not contrarian for the sake of it. We just genuinely believe there is almost always a door nobody has tried yet. Finding it is one of our favourite parts of the job.