Reformat

Re-render the same information in a different representation family (table, diagram, equation, simulation) matched to the operation you actually need to perform.

A 30-message email thread is deciding which vendor your team picks, and nobody can hold it in their head anymore. Someone asks "wait, which one had the better support terms?" and the answer requires archaeology. The information all exists; it's just stored in a medium, conversational prose, that makes the operation you need, side-by-side comparison, brutally expensive.

REFORMAT means re-rendering the same information in a different representation family, matched to the operation you actually need to perform. The cue: your current carrier makes the target comparison, calculation, or navigation costly. The options are wide: prose, list, table, hierarchy, timeline, graph, chart, causal diagram, equation, even a simulation. The discipline is in the choosing: match medium to operation, never to aesthetics. Comparison across repeated fields wants a table, so extract the three vendors as columns and price, support terms, and contract length as rows; ten minutes of work. Sequence wants a timeline; dependencies want a diagram. Then validate that nothing was lost: check the table against the thread for facts and caveats that didn't survive translation. It works when the operation gets faster and less error-prone. The failure mode has a name: format tourism, switching representations for novelty while the real work stays hard.