Mental Model
Risk-Reward Analysis
Risk-reward analysis compares potential benefits with losses, their uncertainty, timing, and consequences
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Cognitive Move
Risks
Name what could go wrong for this party if the plan underperforms, not what they pay for sure. Losses are the known price; this column holds the exposure, the bad-case scenario each person would name if you asked what worries them.
Mental Model
Rites of Passage Framework
Rites of passage, as analyzed by Arnold van Gennep (1909) and elaborated through African and Indigenous examples by Victor Turner, follow a universal three-phase structure: separation (the individual is removed from thei…
Mental Model
Ritual as Meaning Technology
Ritual—structured, symbolic, repeated action—is humanity's oldest meaning-making technology
Mental Model
Ritual-Based Friendship Maintenance
Ritual-Based Friendship Maintenance proposes that the most resilient adult friendships are maintained not by spontaneous contact but by recurring rituals — scheduled, predictable interactions that create maintenance on a…
Cognitive Move
Rival
Names the single most believable other reason the same result could have shown up, the one you would actually lose to. It has to be live and beatable by real data, not a straw option you picked because it is easy to knock down.
Cognitive Move
Rival mechanisms
Write out two or more competing causal stories that would each explain the same pattern you observed. Spell out the actual chain in each one, and keep only the ones that would predict different results, since identical predictions give you nothing to test.
Cognitive Move
Rivals
List the smallest set of explanations that could honestly produce the same result, including the boring ones: chance, seasonality, a third factor, a measurement quirk, people gaming the metric. No straw men. Anyone who believes one has to recognize it as fairly stated.
Mental Model
Robust Decision Making (Decisions That Work Across Scenarios)
A decision approach that selects strategies performing reasonably well across many possible futures rather than optimally in any single predicted future
Mental Model
Rock, Paper, and Scissors
Rock-paper-scissors combines cyclic payoffs with strategic prediction
Mental Model
Role Exit Theory (Ebaugh)
Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh's role exit theory, developed from her study of ex-nuns, identifies the process by which individuals disengage from a role that has been central to their identity
Mental Model
Role Theory (Social Roles Shape Behavior)
The sociological insight that behavior is primarily shaped by the roles people occupy rather than by their individual personality traits
Cognitive Move
role-play against a rule
You take a part that is not yours and one rule constrains what you may say or do. A second person holds the rulebook and calls the violation out loud. The banned move should be the one you reach for without noticing, so the rule catches a habit rather than a mistake.
Mental Model
Role-Playing Model
A rehearsal technique in which participants enact specified roles to practice an interaction or examine assumptions about it
Cognitive Move
Rollback
Build the return path before you go, not after trouble starts. Name in advance what evidence means the move failed, what specific steps undo it, who decides, and by when. Unlike margin or staged steps, this reverses a commitment already made.
Cognitive Move
Rollback
Undo rather than push forward: the trigger returns the destination to a version that already worked, restoring the earlier target, scope, or shipped state. It differs from revision, where you invent something new, and from exit, where the goal dies.
Mental Model
Root Cause Analysis (Engineering Methodology)
Root cause analysis (RCA) in engineering is a structured investigation methodology that goes beyond the immediate, visible cause of a failure to identify the fundamental, systemic cause that, if addressed, would prevent…
Mental Model
Round-Robin Protocol (Structured Turn-Taking)
A facilitation protocol that ensures every person in a meeting contributes by going around the group sequentially, giving each person an uninterrupted turn to speak
Cognitive Move
Route
Attach a specific action to each possible result before you look, including the muddy middle. Not what you would conclude, but what you would actually do next, written so nobody can renegotiate it after the number lands.
Mental Model
Rubber Band Model (Tension Between Holding On and Letting Go)
A framework for understanding the creative tension between the pull of an aspirational future (where you want to go) and the pull of current reality (where you are now)
Mental Model
Rubric Design Framework
A rubric articulates specific expectations in a matrix with performance criteria on one axis and quality levels on the other
Cognitive Move
rule
Check the standing policy that turns a signal into an action: who decides, what triggers what, which thresholds fire, and how work gets prioritized. A correct target and honest signal still produce misses if the response people are allowed to make is wrong or too slow.
Mental Model
Rule Based Models
Rule-based models specify how states or agents change under conditional update rules
Mental Model
Rule Beating
The system dynamics phenomenon where actors find ways to comply with the letter of a rule while violating its spirit—gaming metrics, exploiting loopholes, and satisfying the measure rather than the underlying goal