Mental Model
Continuing Bonds Theory
Continuing Bonds theory challenges the long-dominant 'breaking bonds' model of grief that prescribed emotional detachment from the deceased as the goal of healthy mourning
The encyclopedia
People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
Explore the encyclopedia
3,456 entries
Cognitive Move
Continuum
Puts one quality on a single axis, so a thing argued about as two camps becomes a position, a distance, and a threshold.
Mental Model
Contract as Promise Theory
Philosopher Charles Fried argued that contracts derive their moral and legal force from the act of promising itself—not from economic efficiency or social utility, but from the inherent moral weight of voluntarily bindin…
Mental Model
Contract Interpretation Canons
When contracts are ambiguous, courts apply a set of interpretive canons — default rules for resolving uncertainty in written agreements
Mental Model
Contrast
The communication and persuasion principle that meaning is shaped by JUXTAPOSITION: placing two things side by side changes how each is perceived
Mental Model
Contrast Misreaction
The cognitive bias where evaluation of an item is distorted by what it's COMPARED to rather than assessed on its own merits
Cognitive Move
Contrasting hypotheses or options
Write down two or three rival answers to the uncertainty before you probe, stated so a result can favor one over the others. Without named rivals, whatever you observe confirms whatever you already believed, and the probe teaches you nothing.
Cognitive Move
conversion pipeline
A funnel turned on its side with the loss named at every gap. Boxes hold the count still in play, the band between them shows what carries forward, and a drop arrow leaves each gap carrying what fell out there. Naming the losses is what separates it from a funnel, because a named loss can be assigned a cause.
Cognitive Move
Conversions
Mark every spot where the thing you are tracking changes form, and record what fraction disappears in the swap. Unlike a plain outflow, the quantity does not leave the system; it becomes a different, usually less valuable, kind of the same thing.
Mental Model
Convivencia (Living Together)
Convivencia ('living together' or 'coexistence') refers both to the historical period of relative interfaith cooperation in medieval Iberia (when Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted productively) and to the broader L…
Mental Model
Conway's Law
Melvin Conway's observation that organizations design systems that mirror their communication structures
Mental Model
Cooperation
Cooperation involves actions that contribute to a shared or another party's benefit, often with costs or coordination demands for participants
Mental Model
Coordination and Consistency
The model distinguishes coordination among people from consistency across attributes within a person, and examines how those forces interact under explicit meaning and update rules.
Mental Model
Coordination and Culture
Shared conventions can coordinate expectations and actions, sometimes persisting because unilateral change is costly.
Cognitive Move
Coordination tax
Sometimes the messaging, scheduling, and checking around a task quietly costs more than just doing the task.
Cognitive Move
Coordinator
Check whether the entity's real contribution is keeping other people's work in sync: sequencing who goes when, matching handoffs, and holding a shared schedule. It adds no output of its own, but without it the other parts drift apart.
Mental Model
Core Competency
An organizational capability that can contribute substantial customer value across more than one product or market and is difficult for competitors to reproduce
Mental Model
Core Human Drives (Acquire, Bond, Learn, Defend, Feel)
A set of prompts for considering human motivation: acquire, bond, learn, defend, and feel
Mental Model
Core Self-Evaluations
Core self-evaluations (CSE), developed by Timothy Judge, represent the fundamental, bottom-line assessment individuals hold about their own worthiness, competence, and capability
Mental Model
Correction and Retraction Protocol (Managing Error in Public)
The correction protocol is journalism's formal system for handling errors after publication
Cognitive Move
Correlated independence
Several opinions can agree because they share a source, a method, or a paycheck, so they feel like proof when they are really one opinion repeated.
Mental Model
Cosmopolitanism as Framework
Kwame Anthony Appiah's practical cosmopolitanism rests on two commitments: universal concern (obligations to every human) and respect for legitimate difference (people may make different choices about how to live)
Cognitive Move
Cost ceiling and adaptation rule
Set an upper limit on what protecting this thing may consume in money, hours, and flexibility, plus a written rule for when the thing itself should change or be let go rather than defended harder. It caps the defense so guarding one good thing does not quietly eat everything else.