None are wrong, but neither are any of them able to describe the full scope of the forest. When a botanist looks at a forest they may focus on the ecosystem, an environmentalist sees the impact of climate change, a forestry engineer the state of the tree growth, a business person the value of the land. If we’re only looking at the problem one way, we’ve got a blind spot. By putting these disciplines together in our head, we can walk around a problem in a three-dimensional way. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. By default, a typical Engineer will think in systems. Each specialist sees something different. Instead of a latticework of mental models, we have a few from our discipline. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions variety matters. The more models you have-the bigger your toolbox-the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks.

Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.Ī mental model is simply a representation of how something works. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we understand the world.

Am i not human two steps from hell