Cognitive Move
Change the incentive
Alter the payoff or consequence that keeps reinforcing the behavior.
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Cognitive Move
Change the inflow
Alter the amount or quality of what keeps entering a state or process.
Cognitive Move
Change the Observer
When one viewpoint is treated as the whole situation, write one sentence each from the actor, recipient, operator, outsider, and future-self views.
Cognitive Move
Change the trigger
Define the exact observable condition that starts, stops, or escalates action.
Mental Model
Channel Capacity (Bandwidth Limits)
Channel capacity is the maximum reliable information rate for a specified communication-channel model under its constraints
Mental Model
Chaos Dynamics
In chaotic systems, tiny differences in starting conditions produce wildly different outcomes (the 'butterfly effect')
Mental Model
Character
In storytelling and creative work, character is the element that creates emotional investment—the qualities, contradictions, desires, and transformations of a person (real or fictional) that make audiences care about the…
Cognitive Move
Chart
Pick this when the question is about numbers behaving over a range: a trend, a spread, a share of a whole, or how two quantities move together. Your eye reads shape faster than digits. It cannot explain why the numbers move.
Mental Model
Cheap Talk (Costless Communication)
In game theory, communication that costs nothing to send and therefore can't be trusted as a credible signal—because lying has no penalty
Cognitive Move
Cheapest informative probe
Pick the smallest, fastest, lowest-risk test that could still change which option you pick. It names the actual activity and its duration, not a topic to study. If a bigger version would tell you the same thing, run the small one.
Mental Model
Check-In / Check-Out Ritual
A bookending protocol for meetings that opens with a brief personal or emotional check-in and closes with a reflective check-out, improving presence, connection, and meeting quality
Cognitive Move
checklist
A list where each item carries state. The box holds whether that item is done, which lets the list be worked over hours or days without keeping any of it in your head. The count of ticked boxes against total boxes turns progress into a number you can say out loud.
Cognitive Move
Checklist
Use a fixed list of items with a done marker when the same set has to be completed every time and you keep asking yourself what you forgot. It tracks completeness, not history or comparison, so nothing gets rechecked from memory.
Cognitive Move
Checklist
The cheapest carrier: an ordered list of checks or steps you actually run each time the situation comes up. Use it when the knowledge is a sequence you keep skipping parts of, not a calculation. Weak at tradeoffs.
Cognitive Move
Checklist the Repeat
When a repeated process fails by omission, build the shortest checklist that catches the misses.
Mental Model
Cherry Picking
The logical fallacy of selecting only the data, examples, or evidence that supports your conclusion while ignoring the much larger body of evidence that contradicts it
Mental Model
Chesterton's Fence (Don't Remove What You Don't Understand)
A caution to investigate the purpose of an existing rule or arrangement before removing it, so that hidden functions and consequences can be considered.
Mental Model
Chicken Game (Game of Brinkmanship)
A game theory model where two players head toward a collision, and the first to swerve 'loses' (looks weak) while the one who holds course 'wins'—but if NEITHER swerves, both are destroyed
Mental Model
Chilling Effect
A chilling effect is the discouragement of lawful or otherwise permitted conduct through anticipated negative consequences, such as enforcement, retaliation, or the burden of defending the conduct
Mental Model
Chinese Meritocracy Model (Keju System)
China's imperial examination system (keju, 605-1905 CE) was history's longest experiment in meritocratic governance
Mental Model
Choice Architecture (Thaler & Sunstein)
Choice architecture is the deliberate design of environments in which people make decisions
Cognitive Move
Choose a different zero point
Every number you judge is measured from some baseline, usually one you never picked. Move that baseline on purpose and the same facts read as gain or as shortfall, which changes what counts as progress and what feels urgent.