Mental Model
Bad News Delivery Protocol (SPIKES)
A six-step protocol originally developed for delivering bad medical news, now widely adapted for any context requiring the delivery of unwelcome information
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Mental Model
Balance
In creative composition and life design, balance refers to the distribution of weight, emphasis, and attention across elements to create a coherent, stable, but not static whole
Cognitive Move
BALANCE
Choose this when the loop swings too hard, reacts too late, or blows past safe limits, but still does something you want. You are damping the wild behavior, not cutting the link: add a brake, a buffer, a limit, or a faster signal.
Cognitive Move
Balancing
Look for the loop that pushes back. Here the result counteracts the very change that produced it, holding the system near an implicit set point, which explains why a number sticks at one level instead of running away.
Mental Model
Balancing Feedback Loop
A balancing feedback loop is a closed causal process whose returning effect opposes an initial change
Cognitive Move
Ban-and-Replace
Write down the obvious answers, ban them for five minutes, and force a new candidate by changing multiple slots at once.
Cognitive Move
Ban-the-Map
When your current framing keeps producing the same answers, ban one of its core elements for five minutes and build three replacements before comparing.
Cognitive Move
Band or corridor
An acceptable interval maintained over time, with intervention only when the variable persistently leaves it.
Mental Model
Bandwagon
The bandwagon effect is the influence of other people's adoption on one's own beliefs or choices
Mental Model
Bandwagon Effect
The tendency to adopt beliefs, behaviors, or products primarily because many others have done so—independent of underlying evidence or personal evaluation
Cognitive Move
bar
One bar per category, all starting from the same baseline, so length stands for quantity and your eye compares lengths without doing arithmetic. It is the safest thing in the family because it has one job. The baseline has to be zero, since a bar that starts somewhere else is no longer a picture of the amount, only of the difference.
Mental Model
Barbell Strategy
Taleb's strategy of combining extreme safety with extreme risk-taking while avoiding the middle
Mental Model
Base Rate Neglect
The tendency to ignore or underweight the base rate (overall frequency) of an event when evaluating specific cases—focusing instead on vivid, case-specific information
Mental Model
Baseball Card System (for People)
Dalio's Baseball Cards summarize assessed strengths, weaknesses, and supporting observations to inform collaboration and role decisions
Cognitive Move
Baseline and denominator
Count the opportunities and exposures, not just the hits, so you know what the successes are out of.
Cognitive Move
Baseline or counterfactual
Write down where you actually stand today, measured the same way the target will be measured, and what would likely happen anyway if you did nothing new. Without both, any later change looks like proof your effort worked.
Cognitive Move
Baseline, comparator, or counterfactual
Name the reference point that makes your observation interpretable, because a number alone means nothing.
Mental Model
Basic Growth Model
A basic economic growth model tracks how output supports consumption and investment while depreciation reduces productive capital
Cognitive Move
Batch or stream
Group work into batches or process it continuously to balance switching cost against waiting cost.
Mental Model
Bathtub Curve (Failure Rate Over Lifecycle)
The bathtub curve describes how failure rates change over a product's lifecycle in three phases
Mental Model
BATNA (Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement)
Roger Fisher and William Ury's concept from 'Getting to Yes': your best option if the current negotiation fails
Mental Model
BATNA Preparation Checklist
A systematic protocol for developing your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement before any negotiation, based on Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes framework