Front to back

‘It’s front-to-back!’, my daughter would say with a smile – when she was two. It was creative genius, depicting the meaning of the phrase, back-to-front, in how she structured the sentence itself. It’s a word play suggesting that something is, somehow, the wrong-way-round. This notion of wrong-way-round itself suggests implicitly that there is a right-way-round. Our notions of right-way-round are usually an indicator of convention, function or perspective rather than something that is, per se.

Take, for instance: ‘The West is in the East if you’re standing in Vladivostok.’ The statement only makes sense if we hold a Eurocentric view of the world, in which countries on the left of a flat, traditional map are regarded as the West, corresponding to directions on a compass, and those on the right are (progressively) East. If we form the map into a globe, however, everywhere is relatively West and East of everywhere else, marked only in relation to other places by relative direction and distance.

We could instead take, say, a geo-political view in which places are distinguished or related by location, terrain, access or resources. Or we could take, say, a socio-anthropological view in which places are distinguished or related by history, tradition, language and culture. There is no one, definitive, way of looking at and making sense of what is in the world. Whatever statement I make reveals an implicit personal-cultural construct; a hidden backdrop of beliefs, values and assumptions.

How easy do you find it to view things front-to-back at work, to notice, reveal and challenge existing paradigms and perspectives? If you do it well, what then becomes possible?

Do you need help with front-to-back thinking? Get in touch! nick-wright.com