People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
Cialdini's principle that once people make a commitment (especially publicly), they experience strong internal pressure to behave consistently with that commitment—even when new evidence suggests changing course
Once people take a public position, make a commitment, or take an initial action, they feel powerful internal and social pressure to behave consistently with that commitment—even if circumstances change
Commitment and consistency describes a tendency to respond in ways aligned with earlier statements or actions
A commitment device locks your present self into a future course of action, removing the option of later defection
A protocol for reducing decision risk by converting big commitments into bounded experiments
Ask whether some third thing upstream produced both the suspect and the result, so the two only look linked. If it did, killing your suspect changes nothing, because the real driver sits behind it and drives the outcome on its own.
When redundant or independent safety systems fail simultaneously because they share a vulnerability that was assumed not to exist
A game theory concept describing information that everyone knows AND everyone knows that everyone knows (and so on, recursively)
Mutual knowledge concerns everyone knowing a fact; common knowledge includes all higher levels of knowing that others know it.
A hypothesis that locally reasonable use by many actors is depleting a shared stock nobody protects.
Communal land stewardship is the widespread practice across African, Indigenous American, and Pacific Island societies where land is held collectively by a community, clan, or lineage rather than by individuals
The effort needed to exchange information, align decisions, onboard participants, and coordinate dependent work
Saul Alinsky's community organizing model centers on building relational power through one-on-one conversations, identifying shared self-interest, and taking collective action against specific targets
Compadrazgo is the Latin American institution of ritual co-parentage (godparenthood) that extends kinship bonds beyond biological family to create networks of mutual obligation
Companion planting is growing specific crop combinations that provide mutual benefits—pest deterrence, pollination, nutrient sharing, or physical support
A producer has a comparative advantage in an activity when its opportunity cost is lower than another producer's
Asks the same question of several things at once, so the column where the answers differ becomes the reason.
Leon Festinger's social comparison theory extended to its failure mode: the systematic destruction of satisfaction through upward comparison, amplified by social media's highlight-reel effect
A stable orienting direction used to choose locally when the endpoint can't or shouldn't be fully specified.
Organizations become so good at their current way of doing things that they can't adopt superior alternatives, even when those alternatives are clearly better
The personal version of the organizational competence trap: you become so skilled at one thing that the opportunity cost of developing new skills seems permanently too high
Dennett distinguishes successful performance from comprehension of its rationale
Deliberate practice under conditions replicating competitive stressors
Take the part of a routine that already works every time and freeze it into a checklist, template, or written rule so it runs without you.