Mental Models

I appreciated Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann because it helped me solidify the idea of a mental model as a first class tool for decision making, and understand the importance of of a handy collection of well-used mental models as a component in an information worker's toolkit. In my day-to-day work I've long reached for anecdotes as analogies or metaphors to illuminate an underlying truth about the situation at hand, so it was nice to put a name to this process. In a meta sense, a "mental model" becomes a mental model for that process, and I've started to ask myself "do I have a good mental model for this?" as a matter of habit when confronted with an ambiguous decision.

As my career has progressed, I've more frequently found myself in situations where there's no prior precedent or playbook for solving a problem. Mental models offer a structure for navigating these situations. I certainly have a few favorites—as I get around to explaining them I'll tag posts with "Mental Models" to produce an archive here.