People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
Two criteria become two axes, and the crossing cuts the plane into four kinds. Items get placed rather than scored, which is cheaper and less precise. The value is the naming: once you can say a thing is high on one axis and low on the other, you have a category rather than a hunch, and the empty quadrants ask their own question.
A hypothesis that backlog is creating expediting, task-switching, or rework that further lowers throughput.
Look for places where the scarce thing has stopped moving but hasn't left: it sits waiting on someone or something. Unlike a leak, nothing is lost yet. Ask what's parked, how much, and how long it has been waiting.
People who are in the room and affected, but who never say so. They accommodate instead of objecting, so their silence gets scored as agreement. Ask them directly rather than reading their quiet as a yes.
An activity or dashboard number has quietly replaced the outcome it was supposed to produce, so the score rises while nothing real improves.
r/K selection is a historical evolutionary framework relating life histories to population growth and density-dependent conditions
The topic sits at the center and branches grow outward, with sub-branches added wherever thinking happened. It is loose about level, so it is poor evidence and good generation. Its honest reading is attention: a branch grown into twigs is where you have been thinking, and a branch still one word is where you have not.
Kim Scott’s framework for combining personal concern with clear, direct feedback
A feedback delivery protocol built on two simultaneous requirements: Care Personally AND Challenge Directly
Quine's radical translation examines how linguistic interpretation is constrained by evidence without assuming a prior shared translation manual
Ray Dalio’s organizational principle of extensive openness about information, reasoning, and mistakes
Random-walk models offer a benchmark in which price changes follow a specified random process
Algorithms that use random sampling to solve problems that are too complex for exact solutions—generating approximate answers by running many random trials and aggregating the results
The gold standard methodology for establishing causation: randomly assign subjects to treatment and control groups, apply the intervention to only the treatment group, and compare outcomes
Randomness concerns variation represented by a probability model or unpredictability under specified information
A quality gate: keep only options that are Relevant, Actually different, Next-step ready, Good-result fit, and Evidence-aware.
A list ordered by one stated dimension, with the dimension written on the page. The ranking is a claim, and the claim is only as good as the named dimension. Write the dimension down or the ranking silently becomes a mixture of importance, urgency, and whatever you noticed most recently.
Dennett's presentation of a charitable criticism sequence associated with Anatol Rapoport: accurately restate the position, identify agreement and learning, then explain disagreement.
Gunnar Borg's validated scale quantifying exercise intensity through subjective experience rather than objective metrics
Rational-actor models represent choices using specified preferences, beliefs, and feasible alternatives
John Rawls' veil of ignorance asks: what social arrangements would you choose if you didn't know what position you'd occupy in society? Behind the veil, you don't know your race, gender, wealth, talents, health, or socia…