Mental Model
Burning Bridges
Deliberately eliminating the option to retreat in order to create total commitment to a course of action
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Mental Model
Burnout Spiral (Maslach Model)
Christina Maslach's research reveals burnout not as a single event but as a self-reinforcing spiral with three interacting components: emotional exhaustion (depleted energy), depersonalization (cynicism and detachment fr…
Mental Model
Bushido Principles (Warrior Code Ethics)
Bushido ('the way of the warrior') is the ethical code of the samurai class, synthesized from Confucian duty, Zen Buddhist discipline, and Shinto reverence for ancestors
Mental Model
Business Case
A structured justification for a proposed investment or initiative, including expected costs, benefits, risks, and alternatives
Mental Model
Business Crisis Management Protocol (Incident Command)
A structured protocol for managing business crises — server outages, product failures, supply chain disruptions, PR disasters, or security breaches — adapted from the Incident Command System used by emergency services
Mental Model
Busy as Status Signal (Performative Productivity)
The cultural pattern where busyness becomes a status symbol and performance metric, divorced from actual output or impact
Mental Model
Butterfly Effect
Edward Lorenz's discovery that in sensitive dynamical systems, tiny differences in initial conditions can produce vastly different outcomes—a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could theoretically set off a tornado i…
Mental Model
Bystander Effect
The well-documented finding that the probability of any individual helping in an emergency DECREASES as the number of bystanders increases—the more people present, the less likely any single person is to act
Cognitive Move
C — Converged too early
You picked a favorite before your option set had enough real variety, so your comparison was rigged from the start.
Mental Model
Caching (LRU Cache)
A computing strategy that stores frequently or recently accessed data closer to where it's needed, dramatically reducing retrieval time at the cost of storage space
Cognitive Move
Cadence or minimum viable version
Set the rhythm you are committing to and, separately, the shrunken version that still counts when the week goes badly. Two numbers, not one: the normal frequency, plus the floor you can hit on your worst week without calling it a miss.
Cognitive Move
Calculator
Build a stripped-down instrument that takes two or three inputs and returns the one number the decision turns on. Unlike an open spreadsheet, the formula stays fixed and only the knobs that actually change the answer are exposed.
Mental Model
Calibrated Questions Technique (Voss)
A protocol for using open-ended questions as negotiation tools that gather information, create the illusion of control for the counterpart, and subtly guide them toward your goals — without making demands
Mental Model
Calibration (Probabilistic)
Probabilistic calibration is consistency between forecast probabilities and observed frequencies over a relevant set of resolved events
Mental Model
Caloric Density Model
Caloric density measures calories per gram of food, ranging from ~0.1 (leafy greens) to ~9.0 (pure fats/oils)
Mental Model
Campbell's Law
Donald Campbell's principle that 'the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the…
Cognitive Move
Cap
Set a hard limit on how far a response can go, no matter how large the input gets. Unlike a brake, which softens every reaction, this leaves ordinary swings alone and bites only at the extreme, stopping rare blowouts.
Mental Model
Capital Allocation Options
Businesses can compare uses of available capital such as reinvestment, acquisitions, debt repayment, share repurchases, distributions, and retaining cash
Cognitive Move
caption over image
One picture, one line of text laid across it. The line renames what the picture shows, and the picture then reads as evidence for the renaming. Neither half makes the claim on its own, which is why the pairing is hard to argue with. The test is simple: swap the line for a different one. If the same picture agrees just as readily, the picture was never evidence and the line was doing all of it.
Cognitive Move
Capture
Record important information the moment it appears or changes, before it evaporates.
Cognitive Move
Capture at the Transition
At every boundary between sessions, people, or places, record done, next, blocker, and risk in under a minute.
Cognitive Move
card sort
A deck of cards, one item per card, dealt onto a table and grouped into piles. The pile names live on separate cards so they can be rewritten without reprinting anything. Sorting is the whole operation: pick a card up, decide, put it down. The pile a card ends in is the claim, and the count in each pile is usually the finding.
Cognitive Move
Care, Resource, or Accommodate
Fix the problem from outside your head. Instead of running another internal technique on yourself, change the conditions or get real help: food, sleep, medication, a quieter room, larger text, a colleague, a tool, an extension.
Mental Model
Career Bridges Strategy
Career bridges are deliberate, time-limited activities connecting your current position to your desired future career, specifically addressing the credibility gap: you want to move to X but have no experience in X