Mental Model
Influence of Authority
The deep human tendency to comply with authority figures—even when compliance conflicts with personal judgment, ethics, or evidence
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Mental Model
Influence of Stress (Including Breaking Points)
The comprehensive model of how stress affects cognitive function, decision quality, and behavior across a spectrum from optimal arousal to complete breakdown
Mental Model
Influence Without Authority
Most organizational work requires persuading people over whom you have no formal power—peers, other departments, senior leaders outside your chain of command, external partners
Mental Model
Influence Yourself
The metacognitive practice of deliberately applying persuasion and influence techniques TO YOURSELF—using the same psychological principles that influence others to change your own behavior, beliefs, and emotional states
Mental Model
Influence-From-Mere-Association Tendency
Munger's term for the unconscious influence of associations on judgment—liking or disliking something based on what it's ASSOCIATED WITH rather than its intrinsic qualities
Mental Model
Information Asymmetry
Information asymmetry occurs when parties have different relevant information about a decision, transaction, or action
Mental Model
Information Asymmetry Exploitation
The communication failure pattern where one party deliberately leverages an information advantage to manipulate the other party's decisions
Mental Model
Information Bias (Seeking Useless Info)
The tendency to seek additional information even when it cannot affect the decision—gathering data for comfort rather than for decision quality
Mental Model
Information Diet Framework
The information diet framework (Clay Johnson) applies nutritional principles to information consumption: the information economy produces cheap, attention-grabbing content causing 'information obesity'—simultaneously ove…
Mental Model
Information Overload Paralysis
The counterintuitive failure where more information produces worse decisions rather than better ones
Cognitive Move
Information source
A standing channel that feeds you what other people cannot see: which openings exist before they post, what a role actually pays, who is quietly hiring. You invest in the pipe itself, not in one answer it delivers.
Mental Model
Informed Consent as Shared Decision-Making
Modern informed consent has evolved far beyond 'sign this form before surgery.' Practitioners now understand it as an ongoing process of shared decision-making between clinician and patient
Cognitive Move
Inherited rules
These are the rules you're obeying that nobody in your current situation ever set: leftovers from an old coach, a former job, a program you copied, or advice you absorbed years ago. List them separately so you can ask whether they still apply to you now.
Mental Model
Injury Prevention Hierarchy (Risk Reduction by Layer)
Layered approach to risk reduction, ordered by effectiveness: (1) Load management—most powerful, as most injuries result from training load errors
Mental Model
Innovation Antibodies
Organizations develop immune-system-like responses that automatically attack and neutralize new ideas, regardless of their merit
Mental Model
Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton Christensen's finding that successful companies fail not despite doing everything right, but because of it
Mental Model
Innovator's DNA (Discovery Skills)
Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen identify associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting as discovery skills in their research and practitioner framework
Mental Model
Inquiry-Based Learning
Instruction structured around questions and investigation rather than content delivery
Cognitive Move
Insert checkpoints
Break a long run of steps by adding a stopping point partway through where you test what you have or decide whether to keep going. You add steps rather than reorder them, so errors surface while they are still cheap to fix.
Cognitive Move
Inside bounds
Write down the limits the goal must respect: lines you will not cross, methods that are off the table, minimums that must hold, ceilings and budgets you cannot exceed, and harms to other people the pursuit might cause.
Mental Model
Insider Trading
Insider trading includes lawful transactions by corporate insiders as well as conduct prohibited under applicable securities laws
Cognitive Move
Install a Ceiling Cap
Set a hard maximum on the resource being overdrawn and decide in advance where spare capacity goes.
Cognitive Move
Instances
Pull out the individual, actual cases and set them apart from the general category they belong to. A single case carries details that don't hold for the whole class, so treating one as the category itself quietly turns a one-off into a rule.
Mental Model
Institutional Memory
The knowledge and practical understanding an organization retains and can retrieve through people, records, routines, tools, and relationships