Find a thinking move to make, or a mental model to understand a situation.
Failure Patterns & Anti-Models
Charles Perrow's seminal insight: in systems that are both complex (many non-linear interactions) and tightly coupled (processes happen fast with little slack), catastrophic failures are inevitable—'normal'—regardless of…
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Sidney Dekker's model of how organizations migrate toward catastrophe through a series of locally rational decisions that are individually defensible but collectively deadly
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
James Reason's influential accident causation model: systems have multiple layers of defense (like slices of Swiss cheese), each with holes (weaknesses)
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern by which failure in one component propagates through a system, triggering failures in connected components that trigger further failures, producing damage far exceeding the initial fault
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
A component whose failure causes the entire system to fail, creating catastrophic vulnerability disguised as efficient design
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The system design failure where components are so interdependent that change or failure in any component immediately affects many others, eliminating the system's ability to absorb shocks, adapt to change, or fail gracef…
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
When redundant or independent safety systems fail simultaneously because they share a vulnerability that was assumed not to exist
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure to recognize or account for feedback effects in systems, leading to interventions that produce the opposite of intended outcomes
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Jens Rasmussen's model of how systems migrate toward the boundary of acceptable performance under three simultaneous pressures: (1) pressure toward least effort (workers optimize for efficiency), (2) pressure toward fina…
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Stuart Kauffman's concept from evolutionary biology applied to organizational and technical systems: beyond a critical threshold of interconnection and interdependency, adding more components or connections decreases rat…
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where a system that was once fit for purpose becomes an increasingly expensive liability but cannot be replaced because too many other systems depend on it
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where the sheer volume of alerts, warnings, and notifications desensitizes operators to the point where genuine critical warnings are missed or ignored
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The self-reinforcing pattern where deferred maintenance creates escalating costs that further pressure maintenance budgets, accelerating deterioration
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where a system optimized for a specific set of conditions becomes catastrophically fragile when conditions change
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The system failure where an operator takes the correct action for the wrong system state, producing catastrophic results
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Lisanne Bainbridge's foundational insight: automation creates three paradoxes that can make systems less safe rather than more
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where informal patches, manual processes, and undocumented fixes accumulate around a formal system's deficiencies, creating a 'shadow system' that actually runs operations but is invisible to management, undo…
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where individually functional components fail when combined, because the interfaces between components introduce failure modes that don't exist in any individual component
System Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Gregory Bateson's concept from schizophrenia research: a communication pattern where someone receives two contradictory messages simultaneously, cannot comment on the contradiction, and cannot escape the situation
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The communication failure where hostility is expressed indirectly through actions rather than words, making it difficult to address because the surface behavior is plausible deniable
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Jennifer Freyd's framework for a specific manipulation pattern used when someone is confronted with their harmful behavior: (1) Deny—'That didn't happen' or 'That's not what I did,' (2) Attack—the person who raised the c…
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Named after a 2014 Wondermark comic, sea-lioning is the practice of persistently pursuing an argument by repeatedly asking questions or requesting evidence in a way that appears civil and reasonable on the surface but is…
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The communication failure where the criteria for persuasion or achievement are changed after they've been met, making satisfaction impossible
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Beyond the logical fallacy: the practical pattern of misrepresenting someone's position, addressing the misrepresentation, and then claiming to have refuted the original position
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The deflection technique of responding to criticism by pointing to the critic's own failings or an unrelated problem rather than addressing the original point
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The communication pattern where the emotional delivery of a message is criticized as a way of avoiding engagement with its content
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The communication failure pattern where one party deliberately leverages an information advantage to manipulate the other party's decisions
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The deliberate use of unclear, open-to-interpretation communication to maintain power, avoid accountability, and create an environment where the speaker can claim to have meant whatever is most convenient after the fact
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The self-reinforcing communication pattern where responsibility for problems is continuously transferred from the actual source to increasingly removed parties, preventing root cause resolution and creating a culture of…
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The communication pattern where information is routed through third parties to achieve objectives that direct communication cannot: influence without accountability, reputation damage without confrontation, or informatio…
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The counterintuitive pattern where increasing the volume and frequency of communication decreases actual information transfer by overwhelming recipients and training them to ignore messages
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Steven Pinker's linguistic concept applied to organizational communication: the pattern where terms are repeatedly replaced with softer alternatives, each new term eventually acquiring the negative associations of the ol…
Communication Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The structural pattern underlying all Ponzi schemes: returns to existing participants are funded by capital from new participants rather than by actual value creation, making the scheme mathematically certain to collapse…
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The cascading pattern where insulation from consequences at one level of a financial system enables risk-taking that creates systemic fragility
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
George Stigler's theory that regulatory agencies, created to protect the public interest, are eventually captured by the industries they regulate and begin serving industry interests instead
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The investment failure pattern where the purchase of an overvalued asset is rationalized by the belief that someone else will pay even more for it, regardless of fundamental value
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The pattern where borrowed money amplifies both gains and losses, creating the illusion of genius during good times and the reality of ruin during bad times
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The false belief that you can sell an asset at its current market price whenever you want, which evaporates precisely when you need it most
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The failure to recognize how seemingly small recurring fees compound into enormous wealth destruction over time
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The systematic failure where investors seeking higher returns take on escalating, poorly understood risks—a pattern that reliably precedes financial crises
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The cognitive bias where the denomination of money affects spending behavior: people spend small denominations more freely than equivalent large denominations
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Richard Thaler's finding that people take greater risks with money perceived as 'winnings' rather than 'original capital,' treating them as if they're playing with 'house money' rather than their own
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The systematically irrational pattern of selling winning investments too early (to 'lock in gains') and holding losing investments too long (to 'avoid realizing losses')
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The mechanism by which financial distress spreads from one entity, market, or country to others through interconnection channels that are invisible during normal times but become transmission vectors during crisis
Financial Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
The personal failure pattern where the pursuit of optimal decision-making prevents any decision from being made
Personal Failure PatternsFailure Patterns & Anti-Models
Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Milliken's concept of 'organizational silence'—the collective-level phenomenon where employees withhold information, concerns, and opinions because they believe speaking up is futile or dan…
Communication Failure PatternsAction Protocols & How-To Frameworks
A three-conversation protocol from the Harvard Negotiation Project for handling high-stakes interpersonal discussions
Conversation ProtocolsAction Protocols & How-To Frameworks
A three-step feedback delivery protocol developed by the Center for Creative Leadership
Conversation ProtocolsPage 47 of 50 · 2209–2256 of 2,375 models