Mental Model
Ma (Negative Space)
Ma is the Japanese aesthetic and philosophical concept of meaningful emptiness -- the pause between notes in music, the blank space in a painting, the silence in conversation, the void in architecture
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Mental Model
Machine Analogy (Organization as Machine)
A metaphor that represents an organization through its arrangements, participants, resources, work, and outcomes
Cognitive Move
Machine the Mechanical
Give exact, repetitive, rule-bound work to a tool, but keep interpretation and novel cases with a human.
Mental Model
Madonna-Whore Dichotomy Deconstruction
The Madonna-Whore dichotomy, originally described by Freud, is a cognitive split in which individuals (historically men, but the pattern crosses genders) categorize potential partners into two incompatible categories: 'p…
Cognitive Move
Magnitude and distribution
Turns quantity into a length, a position, an angle, or an area, so how much, how spread, and how it compares become visible.
Cognitive Move
Maintenance
Gains decay unless something holds them up, so this horizon names the recurring upkeep the result needs and what counts as success once the initial push ends. Not a future date, but the ongoing cost of not sliding back.
Mental Model
Maintenance Neglect Spiral
The self-reinforcing pattern where deferred maintenance creates escalating costs that further pressure maintenance budgets, accelerating deterioration
Cognitive Move
Maintenance objective
Set the goal as holding a level you already reached rather than climbing higher. Success means the number stays flat and the routine survives contact with a busy quarter. Nobody is asked to improve, only to not slide backward.
Mental Model
Maintenance-Centered Design
Maintenance-centered design (also called design for maintainability) ensures that a product or system can be efficiently inspected, serviced, repaired, and upgraded throughout its operational life — not just that it func…
Mental Model
Major vs Minor Chords
Major and minor triads differ in the interval between the root and third while sharing a perfect fifth
Mental Model
Major vs Minor Factors
The practice of identifying which factors could materially affect a specified outcome or decision, given their ranges, interactions, uncertainty, and constraints.
Cognitive Move
Make Right Easy, Wrong Hard
Remove one friction from the good path and add one reversible friction to the bad one.
Mental Model
Makers vs Manager’s Schedule
A distinction between tasks needing extended continuity and tasks organized around shorter appointments; people can use both scheduling modes.
Mental Model
Making Mistakes
A learning-oriented approach to errors: detect and describe them, repair their effects, investigate contributing conditions, and test a correction.
Mental Model
Man with a Hammer Syndrome
Charlie Munger's colorful restatement of Maslow's Hammer with a crucial extension: not only does someone with only a hammer see every problem as a nail, but they also become UNABLE to recognize problems that aren't nails…
Mental Model
Mandala Theory of Foreign Relations
Kautilya's geopolitical model based on concentric circles: your immediate neighbor is your natural enemy (competing for same resources), and your neighbor's neighbor is your natural friend (sharing a common rival)
Mental Model
Mandate of Heaven (Tianming)
China's foundational political philosophy: heaven grants authority to rulers who govern justly and withdraws it from the corrupt or incompetent
Mental Model
Manifest Image and Scientific Image
Sellars distinguishes the manifest framework of persons and everyday objects from a scientific framework of theoretical explanation, asking how they can form a coherent understanding of the world.
Cognitive Move
Manipulable Toy
When a theory sounds right but its consequences stay vague, build the smallest spreadsheet, simulation, or prototype with one variable you can change.
Cognitive Move
map
Real positions kept, at whatever scale the question needs: a block, a campus, a town. Streets, water, and barriers go in because they are what makes two nearby things far apart. The finding is usually a route rather than a location. Straight-line closeness and travel closeness come apart the moment a river or a one-way street sits between you and the thing you meant to use.
Cognitive Move
Map
Choose this carrier when what you keep losing is layout or connection rather than a list of items: who links to whom, what sits where, which thing depends on which. You draw the relationships so position and lines carry the meaning.
Mental Model
Maqasid al-Shariah (Higher Objectives of Law)
Maqasid al-Shariah, systematized by Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi (d
Cognitive Move
Margin
Spare capacity you deliberately hold back and refuse to spend: cash, time, energy, attention. Not about sequencing or undoing anything. It asks how much surprise the plan can absorb before it breaks, then sizes the cushion to the surprise you expect.
Mental Model
Margin of Safety
Benjamin Graham's engineering-inspired principle: build in a BUFFER between what you expect and what you can withstand—so that when reality deviates from expectation (as it always does), the system survives