Cognitive Move
Option-creating investment
Instead of choosing among today's options, build a skill, resource, relationship, or runway that makes better future options reachable.
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Cognitive Move
Optional
Flags a link you could cut and still ship. The later item works without the earlier one; skipping it costs polish, not function. Marking these tells you where the slack lives, which items to defer first when the date gets tight.
Cognitive Move
Optionality
Keep more than one live path forward. Ask which choices would quietly close doors, then avoid or postpone those, and spend a little to keep credible alternatives warm. Unlike rollback, this is about future routes, not undoing the current one.
Mental Model
Optionality (Convex Tinkering)
Nassim Taleb's principle of structuring your life and portfolio to benefit from uncertainty—creating situations with limited downside and unlimited upside (positive convexity)
Mental Model
Oral Tradition as Knowledge Technology
Far from a primitive precursor to literacy, oral tradition is a sophisticated knowledge technology with specific design features enabling accurate multi-century transmission without writing
Cognitive Move
Order
Which stages must come before which. Milestones say what the stops are and speed says how fast; this says the sequence is not interchangeable, because some capacities are prerequisites and doing them out of turn causes the damage.
Mental Model
Order of Magnitude
Order-of-magnitude reasoning compares quantities through powers of ten and approximate scale
Cognitive Move
org chart
The same nesting applied to control instead of parts. Each box is a decision or a role, and the line above it names who owns it. Draw the deciding line solid and the consulting line dashed. Any box with two solid lines into it has broken the one-parent rule, and that is where the recurring argument lives.
Mental Model
Organizational Ambidexterity (Exploit and Explore Simultaneously)
The capacity to sustain and improve existing operations while exploring new possibilities
Mental Model
Organizational Amnesia
The systematic loss of institutional knowledge through turnover, reorganization, and poor knowledge management, leading organizations to repeat expensive mistakes
Mental Model
Organizational Debt
A metaphor for organizational compromises or inherited arrangements that create recurring costs as circumstances change
Mental Model
Organizational Debt Accumulation
Analogous to technical debt but broader: the accumulation of deferred organizational maintenance—unresolved conflicts, unclear roles, outdated processes, implicit knowledge, cultural inconsistencies, and structural misal…
Mental Model
Organizational Drift to Failure (Dekker)
Sidney Dekker's model of how organizations migrate toward catastrophe through a series of locally rational decisions that are individually defensible but collectively deadly
Cognitive Move
Orient Out
When looking inward makes things worse, deliberately look outward: name a few things you can see and hear, find one useful object or exit, then retest whether you can now do the task.
Cognitive Move
Oscillating
Look for swings instead of steady growth or a settled level. When a correcting loop reacts to information that arrives late, you overshoot, then overcorrect the other way, and the system saws back and forth around a target it never holds.
Cognitive Move
Other or unknown
Hold an open slot for a cause you have not thought of. The named rivals may all be wrong, so treat your list as provisional and decide in advance what result would tell you something outside the list is driving things.
Mental Model
Outcome Bias
The tendency to judge the quality of a decision by its outcome rather than by the quality of the decision-making process at the time it was made
Mental Model
Outcome Bias Trap
Judging decisions by their results rather than by the quality of the decision process at the time it was made
Mental Model
Outcome Fielding (Skill vs Luck Attribution)
Michael Mauboussin's framework for determining how much of an outcome was driven by skill versus luck
Cognitive Move
Outcome to Mechanism
When a target is being mistaken for a plan, draw the shortest causal chain from intervention to outcome and mark the weakest link.
Cognitive Move
Outcomes per Party
Spell out what each affected person gains, loses, fears, and would call success.
Cognitive Move
Outflows
List every transfer that removes the scarce quantity from a stock, with its size and how often it fires. These are the departures, not the leaks or the delays: money that genuinely leaves for something you chose.
Cognitive Move
Outside alternative
Ask for an option that sits nowhere on the line between the two originals, not a blend of them and not a slower version of either. Usually you get there by changing who acts, what vehicle carries the work, or which resource you use.
Cognitive Move
Outside rivals checked
Line up the strongest non-loop explanations for the same pattern and rule each in or out: a common cause driving both sides, a recurring outside trigger, a trend, seasonality, plain randomness, a one-way chain, a slow drain with no return path, or a competing loop.