High school math class. I was staring at the board, half-bored, half-lost. Then our teacher dropped a line that cracked something open for me: “Base-10 isn’t sacred. We count in tens because most of us have ten fingers. That’s it.”
I blinked. What?
We’d been trained to think numbers were universal, inevitable, unchanging. But suddenly I saw them as conventions. Human-made, like a language. Some cultures count using their thumb to tap twelve finger segments. Base-12 gives cleaner halves, thirds, and quarters. Base-10 only gives twos and fives.
And then the world shifted a little. Not just math. Everything.
If ten isn’t natural law, what else is just habit, dressed up as inevitability?
Language feels inevitable. “Tree” seems naturally linked to that woody thing, but it’s just an agreed-upon sound.
Time feels universal. Twenty-four-hour days, seven-day weeks, January-starting years. But the Mayans had other calendars.
Work feels natural. Forty-hour weeks, performance cycles, and reporting structures. They’re all systems designed for problems we may no longer have.
All of it works. All of it solves problems. But forgetting that someone chose these rules shrinks our imagination. We stop asking why, and start asking only how.
Management is full of inherited frames: roles, cycles, the very idea of “managing.” We optimize what exists instead of asking whether it still fits.
Not “How do I manage better?” but “What does managing mean here, and why?”
Not “How do I improve performance?” but “What counts as performance, and who decided?”
Once you see that ten isn’t the only way to count, everything changes. Management becomes design. A way of shaping what gets supported and made possible.
What frame are you looking through? What assumptions feel so natural you no longer notice them?
The most dangerous defaults aren’t wrong. They’re unexamined.
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I develop these ideas further at richardbrisebois.com.