Strategy & Decision-Making
Prisoner's Dilemma (extended)
The foundational game theory model where two rational agents, each acting in self-interest, produce an outcome that's worse for BOTH than if they had cooperated
Strategic ThinkingThe encyclopedia
People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
Find a mental model
Strategy & Decision-Making
Project Portfolio Matrix
A visual tool for evaluating multiple projects simultaneously across dimensions like risk, return, strategic fit, resource requirements, and timeline
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Reference Class Forecasting
Predicting outcomes by finding the relevant reference class (similar past situations) and using their distribution of outcomes as your starting point
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Regret Minimization Framework
Jeff Bezos's decision tool for major life choices: project yourself to age 80, then ask 'will I regret not doing this?' Bezos used it to decide to leave his Wall Street career to start Amazon
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Resulting (Judging Decisions by Outcomes)
Annie Duke's term for the pervasive error of evaluating decisions by their outcomes rather than by the quality of the decision process given what was known at the time
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Rubber Band Model (Tension Between Holding On and Letting Go)
A framework for understanding the creative tension between the pull of an aspirational future (where you want to go) and the pull of current reality (where you are now)
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Rumsfeld Matrix (Known/Unknown)
The epistemological framework distinguishing four categories of knowledge: known knowns (things we know we know), known unknowns (things we know we don't know), unknown unknowns (things we don't know we don't know), and…
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
SWOT Analysis
A strategic planning tool that maps Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in a 2x2 matrix (internal/external × positive/negative)
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Satisficing vs. Maximizing
Herbert Simon's distinction between choosing the first option that meets your criteria (satisficing) and exhaustively searching for the best possible option (maximizing)
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Scenario Analysis
Systematically imagining and planning for multiple possible futures rather than assuming a single expected outcome
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Scenario Planning
A strategic method of creating multiple plausible narratives about how the future might unfold, then stress-testing strategies against each scenario
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Schlep Blindness
Paul Graham's term for the human tendency to unconsciously dismiss opportunities that involve tedious, unglamorous work ('schlep' is Yiddish for an arduous journey)
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Seizing the Middle
The strategic principle of controlling the center position in a competition—physically (in chess or military strategy), conceptually (in framing debates), or commercially (in market positioning)
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Short-termism
The systematic preference for immediate rewards over long-term value creation—driven by quarterly earnings pressure, political election cycles, evolutionary tendencies toward present-bias, and compensation structures tha…
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Skin in the Game
Taleb's principle that decision-makers should bear the consequences of their decisions—both upside and downside
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Sunk Cost
Resources already spent that cannot be recovered and should therefore be irrelevant to future decisions
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Surfing or “Riding the Wave”
The strategic pattern of timing entry into a market, trend, or opportunity by waiting for the wave of momentum to form and then positioning to ride it
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Swiss Cheese Model (Error Chain)
James Reason's model of accident causation: catastrophic failures don't result from a single error but from MULTIPLE failures aligning—like holes in sequential slices of Swiss cheese lining up to allow a hazard to pass t…
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Temporal Discounting
The cognitive tendency to value immediate rewards more than future rewards of equal or greater value
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
The Idea Maze
Balaji Srinivasan's concept that the value of a startup isn't just the initial idea but the founder's mental map of the entire space of possible pivots, competitor responses, and market evolutions surrounding that idea
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Tip of the Nose Perspective
The tendency to overweight what's immediately visible and underweight what's distant or abstract—a metaphor for the bias toward proximate over distal information
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Trade-offs
Every choice involves giving something up to get something else
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Truthseeking Groups
Groups structured to prioritize accuracy over consensus, social harmony, or status signaling
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Unknown Unknowns
Risks, opportunities, or factors that you don't even know exist—the most dangerous category in the Rumsfeld Matrix
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Zero-Sum Thinking
The belief (often incorrect) that one party's gain necessarily comes at another's expense
Strategic ThinkingStrategy & Decision-Making
Zero-sum vs Non-zero-sum
The fundamental distinction between interactions where total value is fixed (zero-sum: poker, market share competition) and interactions where total value can change (non-zero-sum: trade, knowledge sharing, innovation)
Strategic ThinkingSystems & Complexity
Adjacent Possible (Stuart Kauffman)
Stuart Kauffman's concept (popularized by Steven Johnson) that innovation occurs at the boundary of what's currently possible—the set of all things that are ONE step away from existing combinations
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Agent-Based Modeling
A computational approach to understanding complex systems by simulating the behavior of individual agents following simple rules—and observing the emergent system-level patterns that arise from their interactions
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Attractor States
In dynamical systems theory, states toward which a system naturally evolves and to which it returns after perturbation—like a marble rolling to the bottom of a bowl
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Dissipative Structures (Prigogine)
Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize-winning insight that systems far from equilibrium can spontaneously generate new order by dissipating energy—chaos at one level produces organization at a higher level
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Edge of Chaos (Optimal Complexity Zone)
The concept from complexity science that the most adaptive, creative, and innovative systems operate at the boundary between rigid order and complete disorder—the 'edge of chaos.' Too much order (rigid hierarchy, strict…
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Fitness Landscape
Sewall Wright's visualization of an evolutionary search space as a topographic landscape where height represents fitness (success) and each position represents a particular strategy or design
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Phase Transitions in Social Systems
The concept borrowed from physics—where matter shifts abruptly between states (ice → water → steam) at critical thresholds—applied to social systems that undergo sudden, qualitative transformations when key variables cro…
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Punctuated Equilibrium (Gould & Eldredge)
Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge's evolutionary theory that species remain relatively unchanged for long periods (stasis/equilibrium) interrupted by brief periods of rapid change (punctuation)—challenging Darwin's as…
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Requisite Variety (Ashby's Law)
W
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Santa Fe Institute Complexity Framework
The interdisciplinary approach to complex systems pioneered by the Santa Fe Institute, integrating insights from physics, biology, economics, computer science, and social science into a unified framework for understandin…
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Self-Organized Criticality (Bak)
Per Bak's discovery that many complex systems naturally evolve toward a 'critical state'—a state of marginal stability where small perturbations can trigger cascading events of any size
Complexity ScienceSystems & Complexity
Hub and Spoke Model
A network architecture where all connections pass through a central hub—used in airline routing (connecting flights through hubs), organizational structure (all decisions through a central authority), and information sys…
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Network Centrality (Betweenness, Closeness, Degree)
Three complementary measures of a node's importance in a network
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Network Clustering Coefficient
A measure of how interconnected a node's neighbors are with each other—the probability that two of your contacts know each other
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Preferential Attachment (Cumulative Advantage)
The mechanism by which 'the rich get richer' in networks: new nodes preferentially connect to already well-connected nodes, creating power law distributions where a few hubs dominate
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Scale-Free Networks (Power Law Degree Distribution)
Networks where a few nodes have enormously more connections than the average, following a power law distribution rather than a bell curve
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Small World Networks (Six Degrees)
The empirical finding that most nodes in large social networks can reach any other node through a surprisingly small number of intermediate connections—typically around six (Milgram's 'six degrees of separation')
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Weak Link vs Strong Link Problems
The distinction between systems where performance is limited by the weakest component (weak-link problems) and systems where performance is driven by the strongest component (strong-link problems)
Network ScienceSystems & Complexity
Balancing Feedback Loop
A balancing feedback loop is a closed causal process whose returning effect opposes an initial change
Systems ThinkingSystems & Complexity
Beer Distribution Game (Bullwhip Effect)
Jay Forrester and Peter Senge's simulation game demonstrating the bullwhip effect: in a supply chain, small fluctuations in consumer demand produce increasingly amplified oscillations as you move upstream—retailers order…
Systems ThinkingSystems & Complexity
Bottleneck Analysis
The practice of identifying the single constraint that limits the throughput of an entire system—from Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints
Systems ThinkingSystems & Complexity
Bottlenecks
The performance of any system is constrained by its narrowest point—the bottleneck
Systems ThinkingPage 23 of 50 · 1057–1104 of 2,375 models