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People, books, and breakthrough ideas—connected to the mental models and moves you can use.

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Mental Model

Personalismo (Personal Relationships First)

Personalismo is the Latin American cultural principle that personal relationships, trust, and character are the primary basis for all social, business, and political transactions

Cognitive Move

Personification

Gives one part of a structure a face, a name, and a want, so an abstraction becomes something you can picture and argue with.

Mental Model

Personification Fallacy

The error of attributing human-like intentions, emotions, and coherent agency to complex systems that have none—treating organizations, markets, governments, and nature as if they were individuals with unified purposes

Mental Model

Perspective-Taking

The deliberate cognitive act of imagining a situation from another person's viewpoint, including their knowledge, beliefs, incentives, and constraints

Mental Model

Perspectives and Innovation

Different problem representations and search methods can expose complementary routes to solutions

Cognitive Move

PERT

Durations become three numbers instead of one: the fast case, the likely case, and the bad case. Each node is drawn as a range, and the ranges add along the path. The output is a spread for the whole job, which is honest in a way that a single date is not.

Mental Model

Perverse Incentive

A perverse incentive rewards behavior that undermines the outcome the incentive was meant to support

Mental Model

Phase Transitions in Social Systems

The concept borrowed from physics—where matter shifts abruptly between states (ice → water → steam) at critical thresholds—applied to social systems that undergo sudden, qualitative transformations when key variables cro…

Cognitive Move

Phased path

Break the commitment into stages where each stage earns the right to the next.

Mental Model

Phronesis (Practical Wisdom)

Phronesis is practical wisdom about acting well in particular circumstances, connecting deliberation with ethical purpose

Cognitive Move

Physical

Puts the model in your hands as cards, blocks, or objects, so changing it takes a second and the whole room sees the change.

Cognitive Move

Physical model

Put the information into real space or objects people can move, point at, and stand around together. Choose this when the work is about layout, arrangement, or getting a group's attention onto one shared thing. It fails on abstract relationships with many dimensions.

Cognitive Move

Physical prototype

Build the idea out of cardboard, tape, foam, or scrap so you can walk around it and bump into it. Use this when the decisive test is spatial or bodily, something a spreadsheet or screen cannot let you feel.

Mental Model

Physical-Emotional-Mental-Spiritual Energy Model (Loehr)

Jim Loehr's four-dimensional energy model argues that sustainable high performance requires management across four energy domains: Physical (the foundation — sleep, nutrition, exercise, health), Emotional (quality of ene…

Mental Model

Physics Envy (Precision in Imprecise Domains)

The tendency of social sciences, business, and other complex domains to import the precision, mathematical formalism, and deterministic models of physics—even when the underlying phenomena don't support that level of pre…

Mental Model

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget's foundational framework showing that children's thinking develops through qualitatively different stages—not just 'more knowledge' but fundamentally different cognitive STRUCTURES: Sensorimotor (0-2: learnin…

Cognitive Move

pie

One circle for one whole, cut into slices whose angles are shares of it. It answers a single question well: is this piece about half, about a quarter, or a sliver. It is bad at ranking slices of similar size, because angles are harder to compare than lengths, and it is meaningless the moment the parts do not add up to one fixed whole.

Cognitive Move

Pilot

Run a bounded, real version of the option with explicit success and stop conditions.

Cognitive Move

Pilot Before Plumbing

Run a process manually for 5 to 10 cycles and automate only the part that stays stable.

Cognitive Move

Pilot Before Promise

Before committing, run a bounded real-world trial with defined success and stop conditions.

Cognitive Move

Place

Swap the physical or social setting where the action happens, keeping the method itself intact. Setting carries cues, defaults, and other people, so moving the same activity somewhere else often changes whether you actually do it.