Use when reading a company's founding story, a movement's official history, or your own past decisions — ask what got edited out to make the outcome look inevitable. Use to treat any 'how we got here' narrative as already-rewritten: the contingency and the rejected alternatives are precisely what the telling erased.

Kuhn's 'invisibility of revolutions': the account of how the change actually happened is systematically erased by the very documents that teach the next generation. The rewritten history makes the new framework look like the obvious, cumulative outcome — so each generation is taught a version of its field with the revolutions hidden from it.