Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models

by Gabriel Weinberg

Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late—as they occasionally were—they felt guilty about it—and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. . . . But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this was not what the day care center intended. But the real story only started here. The most interesting part occurred a few weeks later, when the day care center removed the fine. Now the center was back to the social norm. Would the parents also return to the social norm? Would their guilt return as well? Not at all. Once the fine was removed, the behavior of the parents didn’t change. They continued to pick up their kids late. In fact, when the fine was removed, there was a slight increase in the number of tardy pickups (after all, both the social norms and the fine had been removed).

The purely logical way to play the ultimatum game is for the first person to offer the minimum (e.g., a $9.99/$0.01 split) and for the second person to accept it, since otherwise they would get nothing, and there is no other negotiation possible. In practice, though, across most cultures, the second person usually rejects offers lower than 30 percent of the total, because of the perceived unfairness of the offer. In these circumstances the second person would rather deny the first person anything, even at the expense of receiving nothing themselves. It is important that you keep this strong desire for fairness in mind when you make decisions that impact people important to you, such as those in your family (chore distribution, wills, etc.) or your organization (compensation, promotions, etc.).

Distributive justice frames fairness around how things are being distributed, with more equal distributions being perceived as more fair. By contrast, procedural justice frames fairness around adherence to procedures, with more transparent and objective procedures being perceived as more fair.

A related practice is the use of a straw man, where instead of addressing your argument directly, an opponent misrepresents (frames) your argument by associating it with something else (the straw man) and tries to make the argument about that instead. For example, suppose you ask your kid to stop playing video games and do his homework, and he replies that you’re too strict and never let him do anything. He has tried to move the topic of conversation from doing homework to your general approach to parenting.

Another related mental model is ad hominem (Latin for “to the person”), where the person making the argument is attacked without addressing the central point they made. “Who are you to make this point? You’re not an expert on this topic. You’re just an amateur.”

The Enron and Theranos tactics both exemplify another dark pattern, called a Potemkin village, which is something specifically built to convince people that a situation is better than it actually is. The term is derived from a historically questionable tale of a portable village built to impress Empress Catherine II on her 1787 visit to Crimea. Nevertheless, there are certainly real instances of Potemkin villages, including a village built by North Korea in the 1950s near the DMZ to lure South Korean soldiers to defect, and, terribly, a Nazi-designed concentration camp in World War II fit to show the Red Cross, which actually disguised a way station to Auschwitz.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

Another common situation to look out for is a war of attrition, where a long series of battles depletes both sides’ resources, eventually leaving vulnerable the side that starts to run out of resources first. Each battle in a war of attrition hurts everyone involved, so in these situations you want either to have more resources at the start, make sure you are losing resources at a much slower rate than your opponents, or both.

One adage to keep in mind when you find yourself in a guerrilla warfare situation is that generals always fight the last war, meaning that armies by default use strategies, tactics, and technology that worked for them in the past, or in their last war. The problem is that what was most useful for the last war may not be best for the next one, as the British experienced during the American Revolution.

In business, many well-known companies have lost out because they were focused on the old way of doing business, without recognizing rapidly evolving markets. IBM famously miscalculated the rise of the personal computer relative to its mainframe business, actually outsourcing its PC operating system to Microsoft. This act was pivotal for Microsoft, propelling it to capture a significant part of the profits of the entire industry for the next thirty years. Microsoft, in turn, became so focused on its Windows operating system that it didn’t adapt it quickly enough to the next wave of operating system needs on the smartphone, ceding most of the profits in the smartphone market to Apple, which is now the most profitable company in history.

To secure their motivation, Cortés sank his ships to make sure they had no option but to succeed or die. Without the escape hatch of going back to Spain on the boats, the soldiers’ best option was to fight with Cortés. Translation errors led some to believe he burned the boats, but now we know he just had them damaged to the point of sinking. Nonetheless, burn the boats lives on as a mental model for crossing the point of no return. (Sometimes people also say crossing the Rubicon, referencing Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River with his troops in 49 B.C., deliberately breaking Roman law, making armed conflict inevitable and ultimately leading to him becoming dictator of Rome.)

Think about how a situation is being framed and whether there is a way to frame it that better communicates your point of view, such as social norms versus market norms, distributive justice versus procedural justice, or an appeal to emotion.

Try to avoid direct conflict because it can have uncertain consequences. Remember there are often alternatives that can lead to more productive outcomes. If diplomacy fails, consider deterrence and containment strategies. If a conflict situation is not in your favor, try to change the game, possibly using guerrilla warfare and punching-above-your-weight tactics. Be aware of how generals always fight the last war, and know your best exit strategy.

quote from former U.S. senator Bill Bradley in The New York Times is apt: “Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” When you foster a 10x team, you draw on people’s different skills and abilities, allowing each person to play their unique part and collectively achieve outsized impact.

There is no widespread agreement on the aspects of personality to focus on, but Lewis Goldberg presented one leading theory in “The Structure of Phenotype Personality Traits” that suggests there are five key factors: Extroversion (outgoing versus reserved) Openness to experience (curious versus cautious) Conscientiousness (organized versus easygoing) Agreeableness (compassionate versus challenging) Neuroticism (nervous versus confident)

In very small organizations, for example, specialists are more of a luxury. You will want generalists because so many types of problems need to be solved but you have only a few people to address them. In these cases, problems that require specialists are often not frequent enough to justify full-time positions, and so organizations usually rely on outside resources to solve them. By contrast, larger organizations employ many specialists, who can usually get better outcomes than generalists because of their long-term specialist experience.

A similar model from author Robert X. Cringley in his book Accidental Empires describes three types of people required in different phases of an organization’s life cycle—commandos, infantry, and police. Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. . . . A startup’s biggest advantage is speed, and speed is what commandos live for. They work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist. . . . Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. . . . Because there are so many more of these soldiers and their duties are so varied, they require an infrastructure of rules and procedures for getting things done—all the stuff that commandos hate. . . . What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops a...

Educator Laurence Peter introduced the concept of the Peter principle in his 2009 book of the same name, which has become known by the phrase managers rise to the level of their incompetence. What he’s saying is that people get promoted to a new role based on how they performed in their previous role; however, the abilities required of their new role may be completely different, and possibly ill-suited for them. Eventually, they will be promoted into a role that will not suit them (“the level of their incompetence”), where they will struggle.

Tight (many norms and little tolerance for deviation from those norms) versus loose: In a loose organizational culture, you might see people doing the same thing (like organizing a project) in many different ways, whereas tight cultures develop stricter rules and procedures. Hierarchical (lines of power are clear) versus egalitarian (more shared power): You will see more consensus and group decision making in an organization with a more egalitarian culture. Collectivist (group success is more important than individual success) versus individualist: Performance-ranking systems like stacked ranking (where managers are forced to rank their direct reports) occur in individualist organizational cultures. Objective (favoring empirical evidence) versus subjective: Organizational cultures that are more data-driven fall on the objective side of this spectrum.

In relatively recent history, the U.S. has led hearts-and-minds campaigns that directly explain its perspective to the populations of foreign countries like Vietnam and Iraq. In a business context, the concept has been successful when upstarts like Airbnb have made direct appeals to citizens to contact their representatives and lobby against regulations that would negatively impact consumer (and business) interests.

As Charlie Munger said in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, “Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean”

VISION WITHOUT EXECUTION IS JUST HALLUCINATION

The title of this section is a modern take on an old Japanese proverb, “Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”

The first person or organization to try to capitalize on a secret can indeed have a first-mover advantage, crafting a competitive advantage derived from being the first to move into a market with a product. However, they can also experience a first-mover disadvantage if they make a lot of mistakes. Fast-followers can copy the first mover, learn from their mistakes, and then quickly surpass them, leaving the first mover ultimately disadvantaged even though they were first.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen named and championed the model of jobs to be done, which asks you to figure out the real job that your product does, which can be different than what you might initially think. An oft-cited example by Christensen is a power drill: “Customers want to ‘hire’ a product to do a job, or, as legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, ‘People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!’”

Don’t get complacent; remember only the paranoid survive, and keep on the lookout for disruptive innovations, particularly those with a high probability of crossing the chasm.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject area) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren [Buffett] reads—and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.