MODELS
Menu

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

Add a reference signal

Compare what you observe against an explicit approved target, band, or baseline.

Cognitive Move

Add a sensor

Make a consequential stock, flow, or outcome visible that the decision-maker currently cannot see.

Cognitive Move

Add an alternate path

Create a genuinely independent route around a single point of failure.

Cognitive Move

Add redundancy

Where a failure would really hurt, add a second check that fails for different reasons than the first one.

Mental Model

Addiction Cycle Model

The addiction cycle operates through three neurologically distinct stages: binge/intoxication (reward circuit activation via dopamine surges), withdrawal/negative affect (stress system activation producing anxiety and dy…

Cognitive Move

Adjacency by comparison

Ask which items you keep holding against each other, then physically put those next to each other. Distance is the enemy: if two things are compared, every inch or tab between them turns the comparison into a memory test instead of a look.

Cognitive Move

Adjacent actors

Look sideways instead of up or down the chain. Who sits beside the blamed party, sharing its people, budget, tools, or calendar, and constrains what it can do without ever appearing in the workflow diagram?

Mental Model

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

Cognitive Move

Adjust Now

Of the three buffer routes, this is the one where you act immediately instead of pausing or asking for help. Pick a single small, reversible support aimed at the specific function that failed, run it once, then retest that same function.

Mental Model

Adrenal Fatigue Concept and Stress Response Continuum

While 'adrenal fatigue' is not a recognized medical diagnosis (the adrenal glands don't actually fatigue in the way popularly described), the concept points to a real phenomenon: the continuum from healthy stress respons…

Cognitive Move

Advance Signal

Choose an early, controllable indicator that should move before the final result does.

Mental Model

Adversarial System Logic

The adversarial system assumes that truth emerges best when two motivated advocates present competing versions of reality before a neutral decision-maker

Cognitive Move

Adversary

Ask how someone actively working against you would beat this. Not a neutral other party with different interests, but a hostile one hunting for the weakest joint. What they would attack first tells you where your plan is actually thin.

Mental Model

Adverse Selection

Adverse selection occurs when hidden information influences participation in an exchange or contract, producing an unfavorable mix for the less-informed side

Mental Model

Aesthetic Distance

Aesthetic distance describes how a person relates to a work or experience while attending to it aesthetically

Mental Model

Affect Heuristic

The cognitive shortcut where people make judgments based on their current emotional state rather than through careful analysis—using 'how do I feel about this?' as a proxy for 'what do I think about this?' If you feel po…

Cognitive Move

Affected actor

Step into the seat of anyone who actually bears consequences here, including people not in the room. Ask what each one knows, fears, wants, and is paid or penalized for. Unlike the neutral outsider seats, these people have real stakes in the outcome.

Mental Model

African Communalism (Collective Personhood)

African communalism, as articulated by philosophers Kwame Gyekye, Ifeanyi Menkiti, and Leopold Senghor, holds that the community is ontologically prior to the individual -- persons are constituted by their social relatio…