Mental Model
Clinical Decision Rules
Clinical decision rules (CDRs) are validated algorithms that combine clinical findings to guide specific decisions — typically whether to order a test, admit a patient, or initiate treatment
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Mental Model
Clinical Equipoise
Clinical equipoise is the ethical principle that a randomized controlled trial is justified only when there is genuine uncertainty within the expert medical community about which treatment is superior
Mental Model
Clinical Pattern Recognition (Type 1 Diagnostic Processing)
Experienced clinicians frequently make accurate diagnoses within seconds of seeing a patient — before any tests, sometimes before the patient finishes their first sentence
Cognitive Move
Clone test
If two options would start with the same first actions, seek the same evidence, and fail for the same reason, count them as one.
Cognitive Move
Close
A hard audit that decides whether your claimed cycle is a real closed loop, an open dynamic, or no dynamic at all before you're allowed to intervene.
Cognitive Move
Close a missing return link
Take a useful output that currently goes nowhere and feed it back to the decision it should improve.
Cognitive Move
Closure classified
Sort your situation into one of three buckets: a real closed feedback circuit, an open dynamic where something accumulates or queues but nothing returns, or no ongoing dynamic at all. If it is closed, say what travels back upstream. Either way, name what stores the past.
Mental Model
Club Goods
Goods that are excludable (you can prevent non-payers from accessing them) but non-rivalrous (one person's consumption doesn't diminish another's)
Mental Model
Clustering Illusion
The tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random sequences—seeing 'streaks' and 'clusters' in data that are actually expected from randomness
Cognitive Move
Clusters
Look for pockets where nearly everyone connects to everyone else, then note how few ties run between pockets. Where the dense pockets sit tells you where information circulates fast, where it stalls, and which subgroup a change will actually reach.
Mental Model
Co-Parenting Decision Protocol
A structured protocol for making parenting decisions jointly, designed to prevent the common failure mode where one parent makes unilateral decisions and the other feels overridden
Mental Model
Co-Regulation (Nervous System Attunement Between People)
Interpersonal processes through which people influence emotional experience, behavior, and sometimes physiological patterns
Mental Model
Coach's Eye (Expert Pattern Recognition in Performance)
The Coach's Eye is the developed perceptual skill allowing experienced coaches to see what untrained observers cannot: micro-patterns predicting outcomes, invisible compensations signaling injuries, subtle technique shif…
Mental Model
Coaching Continuum (Directive to Facilitative Spectrum)
Maps the full spectrum from fully directive (telling what to do) to fully facilitative (questions helping learners self-discover)
Mental Model
Coalition Building Framework
Coalition building strategically assembles diverse organizations around a shared objective, pooling resources and legitimacy
Mental Model
Coalition Building in Multi-Party Negotiation
When three or more parties negotiate, the dynamics fundamentally change: coalitions form, blocking minorities emerge, and the sequence of agreements matters as much as the substance
Mental Model
Cobra Effect
The phenomenon where an incentive designed to solve a problem actually WORSENS it by creating perverse incentives: during British colonial rule in India, a bounty for dead cobras led people to BREED cobras for the bounty…
Mental Model
Cobra Effect Pattern (Perverse Incentive Dynamics)
Named for the British colonial policy in India that offered bounties for dead cobras, leading people to breed cobras for the reward
Mental Model
Cobra Problem (Perverse Incentives Historical Example)
The historical example from British colonial India where the government offered bounties for dead cobras to reduce the cobra population—which led people to breed cobras for the bounty income
Mental Model
Coda
A coda is a closing section in a musical work; related uses in narrative and experience design are analogies
Cognitive Move
code
The rule as instructions a machine runs. Writing it this way forces you to handle every case, including the ones you were quietly skipping, because the machine will not accept a gap. The cost is that a reader now has to read code to check your reasoning.
Cognitive Move
Code
Write the logic as an actual script or program. Unlike a checklist a person walks through or a spreadsheet you eyeball, code forces every rule to be stated exactly, reruns identically on new inputs, and can be checked against cases whose answers you already know.
Mental Model
Codependency Pattern (Enabling Dynamics)
A relational pattern where one person's excessive focus on another's needs, feelings, and problems becomes a substitute for addressing their own, creating a dysfunctional equilibrium that serves both parties' avoidance n…
Cognitive Move
Coercive defaults
You get people to go along with you by making the alternative hard to reach instead of by convincing them, so their agreement is not really agreement.