Useful Thinking Frameworks and Mental Models

(draft) A map resource you can interact with.

If you subscribe to Shane Parrish's Farnam Street newsletter, you are likely familiar with his fascination with mental models. In fact, in 2019 he started publishing The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts, which now has four volumes tktkcheck.

I've been fascinated with ideas and mental models, too, but I collect them in a different way: in my Brain, slowly, accruing over time.

In my Brain, each Thought records several dates as metadata. I didn't create this big collective thought until October 2015, but many of the models now under it predate it. For example, I added the OODA Loop in 2004 and the Cynefin framework in 2008. Russ Ackoff's Idealized Redesign went in way back in 1998, very early in my use of TheBrain.

This is what happens when knowledge accrues.

This is also an example of one person's knowledge accruing. The process is more powerful when groups do it.

Embed a video here, touching UTF&MM, Design Methodologies, Design Thinking, Critiques of Design Thinking, Participatory Design, back, Decision Making Models, OODA Loop, John Boyd, Brilliant Military Minds, Moltke, Moltke the Elder, No plan, Everyone has a plan, Decision Making Models, Cynefin, Dave Snowden, home, BVSR, Donald Campbell, Campbell's Law, Goodhart's Law, home, Analytic Frameworks, DSRP, TIMN, Theories of Everything, home, Futures Tools and Techniques, Group Process Tools and Techniques, home, Yamas and Niyamas.

Here's a direct link to Useful Thinking Frameworks and Mental Models in my Brain, and here's what that map looks like, trapped on this page:

I'd love to know what models you prefer and what models I've missed, how I might arrange these differently, and what stories you might tell around these items.

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