Mental Model
Tragedy of the Commons
A tragedy of the commons can occur when individual users receive benefits from a subtractable shared resource while depletion costs are spread among others
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Mental Model
Training Load Management (Acute-to-Chronic Workload Ratio)
Systematic monitoring using the acute-to-chronic workload ratio (ACWR) comparing recent load (7 days) to longer-term load (28 days)
Cognitive Move
Traits to states
Stop describing something as a permanent property of a person or thing, and describe it instead as a condition that switches on and off. The question becomes what turns it on, how long it lasts, and what turns it off.
Cognitive Move
Trajectory and scenario
Continues the line you are on past today as a widening band or a set of named futures, so direction and uncertainty show together.
Cognitive Move
Trajectory or rate
A desired direction and pace of change across time, where the slope matters more than any snapshot.
Cognitive Move
Transfer / delegate / automate
Move the action to another person, tool, or system instead of doing it yourself.
Mental Model
Transfer of Learning (Near vs Far)
The influence of learning on performance in another task or context, with similarity and difference varying across several dimensions.
Mental Model
Transfer of Training Design (Learning That Travels to Real Contexts)
Addresses the gap between training and real performance
Cognitive Move
Transfer only preserved structure
After the mismatch audit, carry across only the role-to-role relations that survived it, and leave the rest behind. Everything the audit flagged as broken stops being available for reasoning, no matter how vivid or convenient the imagery still feels.
Cognitive Move
Transfer trouble
Your evidence came from a different person, context, scale, or incentive regime and is being stretched past its borders.
Mental Model
Transference and Countertransference
Transference occurs when a client unconsciously redirects feelings, expectations, and relational patterns from past significant relationships (especially early caregivers) onto the therapist
Cognitive Move
transition matrix
The same information as a grid instead of a picture. Where you were down the side, where you went across the top, and a count in every cell for how many times that move actually happened. The zeros are the point. An empty cell is a move you have never made, and a row that empties into a single column is a habit you did not know you had. It also scales past the point where arrows turn into a tangle.
Cognitive Move
Translator
Ask whether the entity mainly converts one form of information into another so two sides can work together: vague into specific, technical into plain, one team's vocabulary into another's. Nothing new is produced; meaning is carried across a gap.
Mental Model
Trapped in the Robot Control Room
This thought experiment asks how signals inside a robot could become meaningful when their interpreter has no independent view of the surrounding world
Mental Model
Trauma-Informed Care Framework
Trauma-informed care (TIC) is not a specific treatment technique but an organizational and relational framework that shifts the guiding question from 'What's wrong with you?' to 'What happened to you?' SAMHSA defines its…
Mental Model
Treaty Design Principles
Treaty design determines whether international agreements endure or collapse
Cognitive Move
tree
The plain nesting: a root at the top, children below it, one line into each box. Depth means level, and the leaves are what you can act on. The useful discipline is stopping. Open a branch only until its leaves are things you could do tomorrow, and leave the branches you are not working on closed.
Cognitive Move
treemap
Nested rectangles where area is a real quantity. Containment and magnitude land in the same picture, so a category that looks like one item in a list can look like half the page here. It needs a quantity you can defend. Without one, the eye reads size as importance and invents a finding.
Cognitive Move
TRIAGE (RUN / BUFFER / STOP-ESCALATE)
Before adjusting anything, sort the moment into 3 outcomes: proceed because access is fine, support first because 1 function is fragile, or stop and get safety or care because self-help isn't the right tool.
Mental Model
Triage System Framework
Triage is the systematic process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition and the resources available — not based on who arrived first or who is most vocal
Cognitive Move
Triangulate
The middle verdict: the number survives, but never travels alone. You pair it with two or three companion signals chosen to catch exactly the distortions the prosecution named, and you refuse to read any of them in isolation again.
Mental Model
Triangulation in Relationships
The failure pattern where two-person conflicts are managed by involving a third party, which reduces immediate tension but prevents resolution and corrupts three relationships simultaneously
Mental Model
Tribalism
The deep human tendency to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups, then favor the in-group and demonize the out-group—often based on minimal or arbitrary distinctions
Mental Model
Trickster Archetype as Teaching Model
The Trickster is a cross-cultural archetype -- Anansi (Akan/West African), Eshu/Elegba (Yoruba), Coyote (Plains Nations), Raven (Pacific Northwest), Maui (Polynesian) -- who teaches through boundary violation, paradox, a…