Mental Model
Sunk Cost Fallacy
The tendency to continue investing in something because of previously invested resources (time, money, effort) rather than based on future expected value
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Mental Model
Supercompensation Theory (The Adaptation Wave)
The body's training response follows a wave: stimulus causes fatigue and decline, recovery returns to baseline, then a temporary supercompensation window exceeds baseline, followed by return to baseline without further s…
Mental Model
Supply and Demand
Supply and demand describe quantities sellers and buyers would choose at different prices under specified conditions
Mental Model
Surfing or “Riding the Wave”
The strategic pattern of timing entry into a market, trend, or opportunity by waiting for the wave of momentum to form and then positioning to ride it
Mental Model
Surveillance Capitalism Framework (Zuboff)
Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism describes an economic system built on extracting and commodifying human behavioral data
Cognitive Move
Surveillance creep
Monitoring you set up for one small safety reason keeps growing until you are watching far more than the problem ever required.
Mental Model
Survival of the Fittest
Darwin's principle (via Herbert Spencer) that organisms best adapted to their environment are most likely to survive and reproduce
Mental Model
Survivorship Bias
The error of drawing conclusions from the survivors of a selection process while ignoring those who didn't survive—producing a systematically distorted picture
Mental Model
Sustainability
Sustainability concerns meeting present needs while preserving the conditions for future needs, including ecological and social foundations
Mental Model
Sustainable Competitive Advantage
A sustained competitive advantage is a value-creating difference whose benefits competitors cannot readily duplicate or substitute under relevant conditions
Mental Model
Sustainable Growth Cycle
A growth cycle links current activity to an output that can help create further activity, such as referrals, discoverable contributions, or reinvestment
Mental Model
Swampman Meets a Cow-Shark
Dennett examines thought experiments that separate internal structure, future behavior, ancestry, and history to force intuitions about content or category membership
Cognitive Move
Swap the payload
Keep the route and timing the same but change what actually travels across the link.
Cognitive Move
swimlane
The same flowchart with a row per person, team, or system, and every step drawn in the row that owns it. The steps barely change. What appears is the crossings, because an arrow leaving one row and entering another is a handoff, and a handoff is where work sits and waits. Count the crossings before anyone argues about the steps.
Mental Model
Swimmer's Body Illusion (Confusing Selection with Result)
Rolf Dobelli's concept: people assume swimmers have great bodies BECAUSE they swim, when actually people with great bodies are SELECTED into competitive swimming
Mental Model
Swiss Cheese Model (Error Chain)
James Reason's model of accident causation: catastrophic failures don't result from a single error but from MULTIPLE failures aligning—like holes in sequential slices of Swiss cheese lining up to allow a hazard to pass t…
Mental Model
Swiss Cheese Model of System Failure (Reason)
James Reason's influential accident causation model: systems have multiple layers of defense (like slices of Swiss cheese), each with holes (weaknesses)
Mental Model
Switching Cost Analysis (Total Cost of Tool Change)
The comprehensive framework for evaluating the true total cost of changing tools, technologies, or systems—encompassing not just the visible costs (license fees, purchase price) but the hidden costs that typically domina…
Mental Model
Switching Costs
Switching costs are prospective costs of moving from one option to another, including migration, learning, coordination, and relevant financial consequences
Mental Model
SWOT Analysis
A strategic planning tool that maps Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in a 2x2 matrix (internal/external × positive/negative)
Mental Model
Symbiosis
Close, long-term interaction between different species (or entities) taking three forms: mutualistic (both benefit), commensal (one benefits, the other is unaffected), or parasitic (one benefits at the other's expense)
Cognitive Move
Symbols
Swap a repeated phrase for a single compact mark you can write, scan, and rearrange fast. Unlike a name, which is still words, a symbol shrinks the concept to one glyph, so it must earn its learning curve by appearing often.
Cognitive Move
Synchronize
Keep every copy and every person aligned to one current version of the truth.