Mental Model Deconstructions in Action
Part 4
Welcome back to the series.
We have established that each of our effectiveness in creating more efficient and more creative solutions is largely based on the depth and breadth as well as the quality and quantity of our mental models. These models reduce down further into other lower level mental models that draw nearer to less quickly changing rules of our reality, such as those from the hard science disciplines.
We know that anything above those unchanging models is more possible to change. It may not be probably to change some of them, but the point is that it is possible. Innovation and creativity lie in the space of the possible less than the probable.
We know that building these models into your lattice of mental models can be greatly improved with a high-level knowledge of memory and modes of thoughts in the brain.
Additionally, leveraging Chunking and repetition can improve your capability for building your models.
Now, I’d like to spend some time evaluating different forces, systems, contracts, and innovations. Together, we will attempt to break down a few that have come to my mind over the past week.
My own mental models come into play greatly in the following deconstructions, and so your personal breakdown of what is at play will look different from mine. In fact, it’s a great thing that it will. That is what makes the world an interesting and exciting place in which to live, different creative perspectives from different people’s different mental models.
My aim here to is give you just a little bit of a sense of how I break down some of these circumstances and situations that occur around me. I am an aspiring expert. I hope I can convince you to aspire as well by the end of this series.
In the rest of the article, we will try to understand the human invention of the alarm clock, the existence of clouds, and the ideal and feeling of Trust.
The Alarm Clock
To start, let’s state that it is an invention, not a force, contract, or system.
Let’s also highlight the purpose. Mostly, but not always, the concept we want to breakdown has some use case that serves a purpose, and we want to create a better way to serve that purpose. The purpose of the alarm clock is to ensure that something happens at a certain point in time.
For the sake of this discussion, we will narrow it down to specifically waking the sleeper up for some appointment that involves a meeting with other people, a shared appointment. We’ll say the sleeper is a crossing guard named Anne, and that she has her alarm clock set to wake her up for an appointment tomorrow morning. In her morning appointment, she will be dispatched to a new school zone for work. She is generally a pretty heavy sleeper.
Let’s breakdown some assumptions and models involved in the circumstance surrounding the alarm clock purpose.
Something I immediately see at play here is the need for sleep. Can we perhaps remove her need for sleep? If we did, then there would be no need for an alarm clock to wake her up. We’d disrupt the alarm-clock industry. There would be no chance of her sleeping away her day and far less chance of her missing her appointment while in a fully conscious state.
We cannot unfortunately.
Withholding some kind of futuristic brain-enhancer technology that removes her need for sleep, there is nothing doing here. We have already hit an unchanging model built into human psychology which is the need for sleep. If this ever changes, it probably won’t happen soon as sleeping is still a fairly mysterious subject to science.
If Anne needs to sleep then she cannot avoid being unconscious for some time, and she needs to be woken up in some reliable way.
From here, I see two models necessary for the purpose that a typical alarm clock fills.
There is the need for some benchmarking system to keep track of time passed, and there is a need for conveying that a specific event has occurred along that benchmark to the sleeping person, namely the wake-up time event. The benchmark has to exist on some kind of human-coordinated time if she is to make her shared appointment.
She is in luck. As we need to coordinate our shared human social actions in time and space, we already have a such a shared-time system . An alarm clock is based on this benchmark system previously designed. Without it, wakeup times and appointment times would mean nothing or at least be severely inaccurate.
What happened before coordinated time was measured accurately and before an alarm clock was a conceivable idea?
Research shows a couple of things. The earliest is usage of the bladder by drinking some amount of water vaguely equivalent to the needed hours of sleep. Hopefully, these are the exact same number of hours needed by the body to process the water before needing to pee. These hours would become your amount of sleep time before your bladder woke you up to use the bathroom. You can see how this might result in missed appointments.
Other examples include a shared bell on top of perhaps a church in the middle of town or even city workers employed to give a knock at each person’s door and ensure they were up. We all know the wake-up call steel-mill whistle that kept Joe Pesci up in My Cousin Vinny.
These examples are far less accurate and rely on a shared wake up time which would be unsuitable for Anne in our example, unless perhaps the crossing guard division of the city could coordinate a shared wakeup time to wake all their crossing guards up at once.
As far as I know, nobody has invented an app that lets people in similar appointments schedule a shared wake-up time. It feels like an invasive invention while I am writing it, but hey so did riding in a stranger’s car whose only communication to you before entry was “I’m outside”. However, the universal shared wakeup time is not so suitable for the personal freedom of an individual wake-up, which I think is a rather necessary and important development.
There is not much we can change or improve upon here. We need to sleep, and we have already established a very accurate and useful coordinated time we rely on to wake from unconscious slumber.
Let’s take a look at the second aspect of the alarm clock which is the need for this benchmark to convey to the unconscious, sleeping person that it is time to wake. The alarm clock is a benchmark-tracking invention external to the body. The only way some external construct could wake Anne up is through one of her five senses.
In fact, the previous bladder example was a benchmark-tracker internal to the body which is unfortunately inaccurate. An internal benchmark that was accurate would be ideal. Maybe someday, we will have some future version of an alarm clock connected to our brains by implant, or perhaps someday our brains will be wirelessly connected? For now, I think we have to rely on something external to convey the benchmark. Nothing in the body has “waking up power” that occurs regularly enough to be accurately used for Anne’s alarm clock.
We go back to Anne’s five senses. We know that her alarm clock uses noise. Let’s walk through the other possibilities. Sense of sight is gone while we sleep so nothing doing there. Smell and taste would be rather unpleasant — although pretty hilarious to think about — wakeup signals. There is something to be said for touch though, perhaps some buzzer that relied on vibration instead of noise, which you put around your hand. Other members of our households might be grateful for this invention.
Let’s take that. Anne now has a new hand buzzer with a new mega-vibrate wake-up capability. She slips it on her finger at night; it is no more invasive than wearing a ring. She wakes up early in the morning, makes her appointment, is named Crossing Guard of the Year and gets the most-desired school zone in the county.
She loves her new alarm clock, but she secretly hopes for the days of the internal wakeup call device as her hand sometimes feels tingly throughout the day. The alarm clock doesn’t wake up everybody in her house anymore though, so that is a win.
I’d like to briefly take you through what I have tried to do in the above and how it relates to our big picture. Regarding the alarm clock, you can see how I first try to isolate the purpose of it because it is for the purpose’s sake that we are trying to improve the service. Then, I break down the concept of an alarm clock into the different necessary models that fill that purpose. Here, I showed you the models that came to mind.
Sometimes, I work down a checklist of most important models I have constructed over the last few years, so that I do not miss obvious ones. I note which models are either unchangeable or fundamental such as the human need for sleep as well as the models which probably work well enough already. I also note the terrible models. These are the models that could work better or at least could be swapped for something else.
If I’m lucky, my diffuse mode thinking comes up with something wacky or excellent in between my writing hours, which I throw into the mix. The wacky can sometimes be just as useful as the excellent because it opens your mind just a little bit more to the possible that lies past the convention.
For the rest of this article, I’d like to break down one or two more concepts to make the process a little less abstract.
This next example will be a bit odd because the concept is one without a purpose in the context of some offered service. It’s more about looking at the design and seeing if we can apply the models from it elsewhere. We are going to look at how a cloud in the sky works. We want to understand the forces, designs, and models at play so we can cross them into other knowledge domains and perhaps create keen connections and insights for how some other human built system might work.
The Cloud
Firstly, as a cloud is not human built, it must rely on some more fundamental models built into the environment of the earth. These models are probably not as slow changing as the models that deal with inorganics like gravity of falling objects, but they are probably still very slow moving relative to human built systems.
Now we could easily just look up the first google indexed article on “What is a Cloud?” but let’s instead take a look at the kind of mental model breakdown I can make just from a limited knowledge of how clouds work from observation and a few random minutes spent catching Al Roker on the morning weather channel.
It’s good to do this sort of thing because a lot of creative thinking comes from the space of the possible and not the likely — Is it possible a cloud could sprout a mouth and eat the empire state building? Probably not, but I’ll never know that for sure and I may have a great fiction novel on my hands now — Afterward, we can get into a bit of the research behind how they actually work and how some of the different ideas can be laterally applied.
Here is the relatively raw train of thought I am having at this moment as I think about clouds:
- There must be some kind of trigger or saturation point when a cloud rains because it’s clearly not always raining, but it’s probably not scheduled because exact timing benchmarks are a human design
- A cloud doesn’t have a consciousness, so it can’t choose when to rain
- Clouds don’t fall most of the time so they must be light enough that gravity doesn’t pull them down but air resistance keeps them up
- Smog clouds at the ground level doesn’t bother us beside visibility issues and some wet clothes maybe
- there is no apparent schedule for raining; to an observer it appears completely random
- There are clouds of different shapes so there must be slightly different forces at play to determine the different shapes, probably pretty sporadic forces of different weights because clouds can have some pretty crazy designs, and they usually do not have uniform or repeating ones; what could be the grand designer other than a vast number of things that interplay
- I know from flying in a plane through them that they are not a mass of solid but a mass of gas which explains the floaty quality
- They’re not very angular and usually always round at most of their edges
- They dissipate over lengths of space and time
- Human phycology or action does not regularly influence their design as far as I know
There you have it. Not necessarily world changing AHAs but let’s at least walk through what I learned from that before we get into what google says about clouds to supplement.
One point that seems to correspond to quite a lot of situations that have nothing to do with clouds is the circumstance where many different forces affect something’s shape our outcome. This reminds me of the butterfly effect. It is when seemingly the smallest event perhaps caused by a butterfly fluttering its wings creates a change of events that produces a massive event on a much larger scope. There is a book called The Butterfly Affect that offers some great historical accounts of the effect, recounting small circumstances that would have made global history look quite different.
Another point, is the lack of scheduling of rain time on any benchmark. It’s easy to see why primitive cultures attributed many of these random events to gods or magic. What else can you use to explain such randomness and variety when your view of the world is limited.
Most of the articles on google state that a cloud is in fact built from many different factors such as the terrain of the earth, the areas of it heated by the sun, the earth’s rotation, and interacting temperature and pressures in 3-dimensional space. They are largely based on the economics of natural materials that interact with each other around the earth, which then produce more interaction. The smallest changes in any of these factors can influence the shape of the cloud.
It’s a good metaphor for our endeavors, which can be greatly improved sometimes by changing the slightest of factors. Quite a lot of the same models reverberate throughout reality under different names and across different subject areas.
The Concept of Trust
Now, I’d like to consider both the ideal and the feeling of Trust and the concepts at play in both of them. Both are important social models.
The feeling of trust is one that belongs to organics as opposed to inorganics and is actually built on a need for survival. It is an unchanging model. Long ago, humans needed to live in numbers to survive the elements, and the result is that the need to trust and depend upon others is built into our psychology.
Trust is even etched into us at a cellular level based on whether our needs for trust our met or not. There is a recent and still developing body of research called trans-generational trauma that shows the trauma is genetically and not just socially passed down inside our genetic code.
The feeling of trust is not uniquely human. Animals too rely on trust to feel good and happy. Even trees are aware when other trees are malnourished and can divert resources to them through interlocking roots below the ground. They too feel the loss of a member of their community when a tree dies. They can warn each other of nearing dangers by spreading pheromones through the air.
Trust as an ideal is a uniquely human trait. As humans, the ideal of trust develops from the senses of happiness and fulfillment which we feel when the need for trust is met. Trust the ideal develops from Trust the feeling. We treat it as an ideal or an aspiration. Trust as an ideal is an unchanging model as well although at a slightly higher level than trust the feeling. Ideals can change slowly over a lifetime, but social needs change much less frequently.
Earning the trust of those around us provides us stability. Understanding that this model is at play can help us in our collaborative efforts. Social initiatives or joint human endeavors require trust to be seen through effectively. They crumble without it. Building trust into those involved is an essential part of any worthy aim.
I hold great respect for this model in the area of collaborative work. The teams that do the best trust each other the most. The organizations that achieve the most understand that this model is prerequisite for their success, and they take proactive steps to encourage its development. They know promoting the ideal of trust will produce feelings of trust which will produce better quality work.
An individual can do the same in just about any collaborative activity. Be the person that develops the trust, and not the one that waits for it to develop.
Revisiting the Lens of the Mental Model
The first part of improving something is recognizing the models that are already present and working well. Sometimes we will drive these models along, and other times we will nudge them. Ultimately, we want to grow them.
The second part is recognizing what models are not working and taking steps to shrink or remove them. Observing life from the perspective of models gives you a degree of separation from the murkiness of blended circumstance and situation. This distance will help you improve each of them.
We have now understood how breaking down the invention of an alarm clock, the forces at play in clouds, and the ideal of trust can help us better improve our models themselves as well as notice where we can apply lateral concepts to better understand other things around us.
My hope for this series is that it grows more awareness of the variety in what is possible through the lens of mental models.
In the months following this series, I’d like to continue sharing my mental model deconstructions including both the exciting and the wacky to help my readers to better understand and engage what is going on around them to live more observant, exciting, and productive lifestyles.
I hope you have enjoyed the series and the strategy I described within. My last article of this series will go over some action steps to help you get started using the strategy described in the first four parts.
Over the next few days, attempt a deconstruction of your own on some situation around you. Try to uncover assumptions and lower-level models that can change and fundamental ones that cannot.
In Part 5 of the series, we’ll share some next steps. If you missed the Part 3 on how our brain build mental models, be sure to have a look.
Thanks for reading!
Glossary of Terms and Relationships
Model Deconstruction is breaking a situation, circumstance, or model into its constituent lower-level models to observe the ones that can change and the ones that cannot; we can deconstruct with a purpose in mind for the innovation or simply to observe what comes to mindCitations
[1] Wohlleben, Peter, The Hidden Life of Trees, Greystone Books, 2016.
