Mental Model
Professional Reinvention Timeline
Herminia Ibarra's research reveals that identity transitions follow a predictable 2-4 year timeline
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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
Professional Reputation Compound Interest
Professional reputation compounds like financial interest: small, consistent investments in quality and integrity accumulate exponentially
Mental Model
Prognostic Disclosure Strategy
Prognostic disclosure is the clinical art of communicating likely future outcomes — life expectancy, functional decline, treatment response — with honesty calibrated to the patient's readiness and needs
Mental Model
Prognostic vs. Diagnostic Thinking
Medical reasoning involves two fundamentally different cognitive tasks that practitioners learn to distinguish: diagnostic thinking (What does this patient have?) and prognostic thinking (What will happen to this patient…
Cognitive Move
Program
Recast the problem as code you could actually run: explicit inputs, ordered steps, if-then branches, a loop, and a stopping rule. Unlike a loose process, every step is specified well enough to execute, hand off, or debug line by line.
Mental Model
Progressive Assembly Sequence
Experienced builders understand that assembly order is often as important as component quality
Cognitive Move
Progressive disclosure
Show only what the current decision needs, and keep the rest hidden until someone asks for it. Unlike a layout that shows everything at once, this stages the reveal so the surface stays small and the next step stays obvious.
Mental Model
Progressive Disclosure
Progressive disclosure presents relevant initial information or controls while making additional detail available through clear access
Mental Model
Progressive Overload Principle (The Minimum Effective Dose of Challenge)
The body adapts only to stresses exceeding previous demands; continued improvement requires systematically increasing the stimulus
Mental Model
Project Portfolio Matrix
A visual tool for evaluating multiple projects simultaneously across dimensions like risk, return, strategic fit, resource requirements, and timeline
Mental Model
Project-Based Learning (PBL)
PBL organizes instruction around complex, authentic projects requiring sustained investigation of real-world problems
Mental Model
Promotability
The observation that the skills that get someone promoted are often different from the skills needed to succeed at the next level
Mental Model
Propaganda Detection Framework
The propaganda detection framework identifies techniques for manipulating public opinion, updated from the 1930s Institute for Propaganda Analysis
Cognitive Move
Propagation paths
Trace the multi-step routes something actually travels through the graph: who reaches whom in two or three hops, where a message, invitation, or mood stalls out, and which links every route depends on. Direct ties alone tell you nothing about reach.
Mental Model
Propinquity Effect (Proximity Breeds Connection)
The robust finding that physical proximity is one of the strongest predictors of relationship formation—people form friendships, partnerships, and romantic relationships disproportionately with those they encounter frequ…
Mental Model
Proportionality Principle
The response to a violation, threat, or problem should be proportionate to its severity—not maximally harsh, not trivially lenient, but scaled to the actual magnitude of the situation
Cognitive Move
Proposal authority
Who is allowed to put an option on the table in the first place. Not who says yes, but whose ideas even reach the room. Name the people or roles that can formally raise a proposal, and how someone outside that set gets an idea heard.
Cognitive Move
Proposition
Writes the relation on the line, so two boxes and the link between them read back as one sentence you can check.
Cognitive Move
prose
Continuous sentences with no visible scaffolding. The order of clauses is the order of thought, and the connectives do the structural work: because marks a cause, but marks a reversal, so marks a consequence. Nothing is labeled, which is why prose can carry hedges and half-certainties that a diagram would have to flatten into a box or drop entirely.
Cognitive Move
Prose
Running sentences and narrative carry why something happened, what it felt like, and the caveats that resist columns. Pick this form when the reader needs reasoning and context, not lookup. It is the wrong carrier when someone must compare the same fields repeatedly.
Mental Model
Prosecutor's Fallacy
The statistical error of confusing P(evidence|innocent) with P(innocent|evidence)—the probability of seeing this evidence IF someone is innocent versus the probability that someone IS innocent GIVEN this evidence
Mental Model
Prospect Theory
Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel Prize-winning theory that people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point (not in absolute terms), feel losses roughly twice as strongly as equivalent gains (loss aversion), and are ri…
Mental Model
Prospect-Refuge Theory (Appleton)
Jay Appleton's theory proposes that humans instinctively prefer environments offering both prospect (open views for surveillance) and refuge (enclosed spaces offering safety)
Cognitive Move
Prospective prediction or held-out test
Lock the rule first, then test it on future or reserved cases it has never seen.