Mental Model
System 1 / System 2 Thinking
Kahneman's dual-process framework: System 1 is fast, automatic, intuitive, emotional, and effortless—it generates impressions, feelings, and quick judgments without conscious effort
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Mental Model
System Archetypes
Peter Senge's catalogue of recurring system behavior patterns that appear across different contexts—templates of dynamic behavior that repeat because the underlying causal structure repeats
Mental Model
System Migration to the Edge (Rasmussen)
Jens Rasmussen's model of how systems migrate toward the boundary of acceptable performance under three simultaneous pressures: (1) pressure toward least effort (workers optimize for efficiency), (2) pressure toward fina…
Cognitive Move
System operator
Take the seat of whoever runs the arena rather than plays in it: the platform, referee, or regulator. They see aggregate patterns, base rates, and rule levers no single participant can see, and their incentives differ from everyone competing inside.
Mental Model
Systemic Risk vs Idiosyncratic Risk
The distinction between risk that affects the entire system (systemic—market crashes, recessions, pandemics) and risk specific to individual components (idiosyncratic—one company's product failure, one person's job loss)
Mental Model
Systemization
Systemization makes suitable recurring work more repeatable and transferable through clear responsibilities, instructions, resources, checks, and exception handling
Cognitive Move
systems archetype
A named pair of loops whose shape recurs across unrelated situations. Fixes that fail pairs a fast balancing loop with a slow reinforcing one, so the relief arrives first and the cost arrives later. Shifting the burden, limits to growth, and escalation are the same idea with different wiring. You reach for the shape first and fill in your own nouns second, which is the reverse of how the other renderers work.
Mental Model
Systems Integration Testing
Systems integration testing (SIT) verifies that individually tested components work correctly when combined into a complete system
Mental Model
Systems Thinking as Fifth Discipline
Peter Senge's framing of systems thinking as the integrative discipline that makes the other four organizational learning disciplines (personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning) effective
Cognitive Move
T - Target architecture or time mismatch
The goal aims in roughly the right direction but uses the wrong shape, horizon, or precision for how the result actually behaves.
Cognitive Move
T — Two or too few
Your decision has collapsed into an either/or when more genuinely different paths exist.
Cognitive Move
T-chart
One thing, one vertical line, two columns. Usually for and against, sometimes what you know and what you assume. The narrowness is the point: a T-chart admits only one item at a time and makes the imbalance between the two sides visible by length alone, without pretending the items are weighted equally.
Mental Model
T-Shaped Professional
The T-shaped professional has deep expertise in one domain (vertical stroke) combined with broad knowledge across disciplines (horizontal stroke)
Mental Model
Ta'aruf (Mutual Recognition and Understanding)
Ta'aruf derives from the Quranic verse 49:13: 'We created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another (li-ta'arafu).' This is not merely tolerance or coexistence but an active t…
Cognitive Move
table
Things down the side, criteria across the top, one answer per cell. Reading across a row describes one thing. Reading down a column ranks everything on one criterion. The table is the plainest form of the family and the one to reach for first, because it makes you name the criteria before you fill anything in.
Cognitive Move
Table
Pick this form when several things share the same fields and you need to compare or look up a value fast. Entities become rows, shared attributes become columns. It kills causal sequence and rich exceptions, so keep those in a note beside it.
Cognitive Move
Table
Use this carrier when several items share the same fields and you keep re-answering the same question about each one. Items become rows, the shared attributes become columns, so you can scan or compare instead of recalling item by item.
Cognitive Move
Table Before Prose
When long prose keeps repeating the same fields, pull the entities into rows and the attributes into columns, keeping narrative only for exceptions.
Cognitive Move
tabletop with tokens
A shared board, movable pieces, and a turn order. Everyone sees the same state, which stops the argument about what is actually happening. Because seats differ, one player meets a constraint that another never touches, and the debrief compares those two experiences of one rule set.
Mental Model
Tactical Empathy (Chris Voss)
Tactical empathy is the deliberate practice of understanding and articulating the other party's perspective, emotions, and constraints—not because you agree with them, but because demonstrating that understanding disarms…
Mental Model
Tactical Empathy Protocol (Chris Voss)
A negotiation protocol from former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss that uses empathic listening as a tactical tool to build trust and extract information
Cognitive Move
Tail harm
Look at the worst outcome anyone actually suffered, not the typical one. Ask how bad it gets at the far edge for the unluckiest few, and whether that severity is survivable, regardless of how rare it is.
Mental Model
Tail Risk (Extreme Event Risk)
The risk of events that lie far from the center of a probability distribution—rare but extreme outcomes that standard risk models underweight or ignore entirely
Mental Model
Talking Stick Protocol (Structured Turn-Taking)
The Talking Stick is an Indigenous North American communication protocol used across numerous nations (including Haudenosaunee, Ojibwe, and many Plains nations) to structure group deliberation