People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.
3,456 entries
The same triples, except the relation types come from a short fixed list, and each thing gets exactly one node no matter how many notes mention it. Reusing relation names is the discipline that makes it searchable later, because you can ask which links are labeled contradicts and get an answer. Heavier to start, and it repays that only if the notes keep arriving.
When individuals or teams deliberately or unconsciously accumulate and withhold knowledge to increase their power, job security, or perceived indispensability
Kolmogorov complexity measures the shortest generating program for an object on a specified universal machine and is uncomputable in general
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross originally proposed five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—as patterns observed in terminally ill patients
One frame, several drawn figures, each with a label naming a party. The claim lives in how you drew them: who is tall, who is small, who is facing away, who got a face at all. Nothing in that claim is written, so nothing in it can be checked. It is the fastest way to show a relationship between parties, and the easiest place to put an inner state into someone's head without noticing you have done it.
One object drawn plainly, with leader lines running to labels written in the reader's own nouns. The object contributes almost nothing except a place for the labels to sit where they can be compared. The gag is that the labels are the argument and the picture is the excuse to line them up. It works because three phrases attached to one thing get read, and the same three phrases in a list do not.
A specific technique protocol for verbally identifying and naming the other person's emotions during a negotiation, which paradoxically defuses negative emotions and reinforces positive ones
Swap the either/or category name for a graded scale, so the question changes from which box someone or something belongs in to how much of the quality is present, measured in degrees you can actually rate.
Position becomes a short list of named rungs in order, stacked bottom to top. Rungs need not be evenly spaced, and the gaps between them are often the interesting part. A ladder is honest when the levels are recognizable to anyone in the field and dishonest when it chops a genuinely smooth quality into steps that only exist on your page.
Chris Argyris and Peter Senge's model of how people move from observable data to action through a series of increasingly abstract inferences: select data → add meaning → make assumptions → draw conclusions → adopt belief…
An advanced mathematical optimization technique that handles hard constraints by moving them into the objective function with penalty weights—converting a constrained optimization problem into an easier unconstrained one
Across Indigenous traditions worldwide -- from the Maori concept of whenua (land = placenta), to the Lakota 'Mitakuye Oyasin' (all my relations) applied to land, to Aboriginal Australian country-as-kin -- land is underst…
Steven Pinker's argument that language is not a cultural invention but a biological adaptation—an instinct as natural to humans as web-spinning is to spiders
A vocal technique protocol from Chris Voss for controlling the emotional tone of negotiations through deliberate voice modulation
The far column, holding the state you intend to still have years out and refuse to trade away. Name it directionally with a review date rather than a precise target, then check whether today's plan quietly spends it.
De Bono's lateral thinking approach uses deliberate changes of perspective, assumptions, and associations to generate alternatives
A connected repertoire of models from multiple fields, selected and compared for their relevance to a specific question
The law of large numbers gives conditions under which an average converges to an expected value as observations accumulate
Keep one shared frame and stack separate planes of information on top of it, each able to be shown or hidden. Unlike side-by-side arrangements, everything occupies the same space, so you compare by switching planes rather than moving your eyes.
A hypothesis that a useful cycle is producing value but leakage or decay removes more state than the next turn can reuse.
Dennett uses the vast space of possible texts and calculations to examine distinctive design, transmission, and historical connection
When the mechanism is unknown, run the cheapest decision-linked test with a deadline before setting a performance target.
The practice of systematically extracting learning from decisions—both successful and unsuccessful—through structured review processes
Seligman's discovery that when organisms experience repeated, uncontrollable negative events, they learn to stop trying to escape—even when escape becomes possible