Mental Models, A Strategy to Achieve Innovation and Creativity

Part 1

How often do you want a deeper understand of how somebody else, an expert in engineering or basketball perhaps, created their expertise? How did they learn, and what did they practice? How did they create innovation in their field? Do they have a strategy? Or do they haphazardly learn anything they can get their hands on until eventually they know enough to compel others to pay attention?

Over a series of articles, I’d like to explore the concepts of innovation and creativity alongside learning and practice. I’ll also share an interesting approach to uncovering new ways to look at existing things.

My interest is to share a strategy that I use to understand circumstances and situations that occur around me and the forces that play into them, to better understand the people around me and their motivations, to learn and create at a faster pace, and to erect a road map for innovation. Its purpose is to disrupt the unquestioned way that certain facets of our world operate in order to improve it.

In sharing, I hope you take way a few ideas about how to use your mind to better engage the world around you. I’m excited to have you on this journey.

Seeing What Is Not Yet There

As I sit in my work from home office near a window that outlooks a train yard and a normally bustling city, I notice one solitary building unlike all the others. It’s about the same height as the others, and I imagine the inside is not so very different from the large residential complexes that are popping up all over major cities today with gym, pool, and concierge. It too has its own parking garage for its residents. It overlooks a view of the river and the brochure uses the words “luxury apartment” more times than I can count. What makes this building different, is that it is shaped like an ellipse. In fact, the official title of the building is “The Ellipse”. I’ve never been inside but I have walked around it in rectangular fashion as the block around it is shaped normally unlike the building.

The two questions I had when I first saw the building were “Why is that building shaped like an ellipse?” and “Why are all the other buildings I’ve ever seen not?”.

For this particular building, I imagine it was to make a marketing statement, although I have not found the sure answer to the question yet. But to the other question, if this building is an ellipse, why are others not?. Should we have been building elliptical buildings all along? I’m sure the construction is harder but maybe not so if our body of home building knowledge had been historically focused on ellipses. It does feel like a more natural shape. After all, tree trunks and plant stems are more circular than square. It’s worth noting the order of thought here. Only did I think about elliptical buildings when I first saw one, but there are no rules manmade or of nature that stipulate it can’t be done. It’s tough to open your mind to the possibility of an elliptical building when the rectangular convention is staring at you from every direction.

The Lens of the Mental Model

The strategy I’d like to share is meant to help you produce more insights like elliptical building construction in your mind before you have to see the convention broken with your own eyes. It is based on the mental model, a concept introduced to me by Charlie Munger.

Mental Models are representations in our mind of some kind of concept at play in our reality be it a physical one, a psychological one, maybe a system, it could really be almost anything. What we do as humans when we try to understand real world concepts is to improve our mental models so that they better reflect reality. The smaller the space between our models and reality, the more accurate is our knowledge of what is really going on. We extend and prune our mental models over time to adjust to new information as we are presented with new ideas about how certain concepts work.

Seeing situations through the lens of mental models gives us a baseline from which to make improvements. Let’s take the example of a human designed system such as a train ticketing system in the context of a hurried traveler’s mental model.

The Doctor and The Train Station

Suppose a very busy doctor is leaving to go to work at a hospital by train. Unfortunately, she is called in on her day off to help out with an upsurge in patients. Consequently, she does not have train ticket.

She holds in her head a well-defined mental model for how the train ticketing system works at this station because she has taken a train to work from it numerous times before. She will have to purchase a ticket for the train that will get her to the hospital at a particular time for a particular dollar amount. Because her model for this station is well-defined, she expects to easily locate the ticket machine at the station and enter the train line departure time and ticket volume into the machine relatively quickly. She can do this by heart without even having to read the directions on the screen, as she has done it so many times before.

She pulls up by taxi to the train station, and upon walking in, finds that the ticket booth has been moved to a new location. It is unclear where. Upon finally finding it, she notices that the station has updated the look and the feel of the machine, and it has also changed the wording on its instructions. She now has to spend more time understanding how to purchase the ticket. On top of that let’s say that the train departure corridor has been moved. She has to spend more time looking at the train departure schedule to understand where her train line is. She is thrown off her mental balance for a few minutes.

Reality failed to conform to the mental model she held in her head, and on which she was relying to make it to work on time. She now has to update her model.

To round the story off with a happy ending, she manages to rewire her mental model, board the train and make it to work on time to help out, although a bit flustered. She will probably have to run through the train ticket purchase a few more times before the new mental model sticks with her.

Mixing and Matching Mental Models

The story illustrates the working mental models we hold in our heads and what happens when they change. Despite it being a somewhat frustrating circumstance for the doctor, the example is a common one which reflects the reality of a changing world with changing constructs.

Let’s return briefly to the example of a ticketing system designed for a large number of arrivals and departures.

Most people living in larger cities have a fairly good working concept or mental model of this system in their heads, and they understand that there may be some small variance in it based on a particular train station location. However, if there was any large upheaval in the way this system worked, people would be at first confused and then probably a little frustrated. Then they would have to put in the effort to reconstruct their mental model for how a ticketing system works.

You can see why we resist change habitually. Hopefully though, the transit authority made the changes to make things easier and once travelers adapt to the new model, it will be.

A mental model is a living thing that we can reinforce and improve, completely replace, or forget from disuse.

Let’s take another shorter example. There is a concept called reciprocation theory that is similar to give and take. It’s the evolutionary basis for the concept, “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine”. It’s present in all humans because of the way we evolved to rely on each other to survive, and it is also something heavily used in sales. To create a feeling of needing to reciprocate perhaps by making a purchase, a salesman might offer a favor first. The feeling can be something that is hard to ignore because the model is something built into our psychology that we historically needed in order to survive. We cannot easily turn it off or replace it. It is quite different from a human built system like train-ticketing which can change quite often.

It helps to recognize the models like this in thinking about possible ways to improve things. We want to recognize what can change and what cannot. A train ticketing system falls into a set of models that represent human inventions, systems, and ideas about how they should work. Beyond us all being used to how they work, there is nothing that says they have to work that way at all. They can change. This creates opportunity for innovation.

The Fundamental Models

We as humans hold a mental model for everything from how to get dressed in the morning, to how buildings are supposed to be shaped, to how to solve a math problem, or how to work through an argument. Our models change over time to accommodate experiences of different forces, contracts, and systems at play in the different circumstances and situations we find ourselves in. Quite a lot of models we interact with on a daily basis exist in this space of human creation and ingenuity because they were designed and built by humans.

There is a space of models that exist at a lower level which are much less affected by humans and much more rarely change. Let’s call them the fundamental models. We saw one of them early with reciprocation theory. It’s a psychologic model fixed into humanity that does not change. It’s been tethered to our psychology for thousands of years.

Another fundamental model is shown by the simple example of dropping a ball on earth. Exempt from any interfering forces, it will fall to the ground without fail. Gravity is fundamental, and the model we hold in our brain of it is unlikely to change. It is a model sewn into the fabric of our universe much unlike the contracts and systems we build ourselves. Our systems do have to rely on it and account for it though.

Fundamental models like gravity come from the hard science subjects of math, physics, chemistry, and biology as well as subjects of psychology, economics, and engineering, all of which are higher level but are based in the hard sciences. I use the term levels to distinguish the human capacity to influence the models at each level. The lower the level, the less likely.

How do we know the models from the hard sciences will remain the same forever? We don’t for sure. But some of the largest datasets we have in history, namely the history of inorganics, organics, and human beings, are responsible for our current knowledge of these unchanging models. Over time, as scientists and researchers have studied these datasets, they have noted the models that have recurred for many thousands of years; the models that govern inorganics have not changed for hundreds of millions. Our mental models of them thus only needs to update a very slow pace as well, as more careful discovery is done by scientists. Most will not change over the course of our lifetime.

These models have two uses.

One is that they exist at the route of all the things we build as humans. They are the unchanging parts. Likely, we cannot swap them out for a better model which means it is harder to innovate at this level. We can’t reprogram ourselves to avoid the influence of reciprocation tendency. But we can create rules around what a salesman is and is not allowed to do while selling. We can’t replace gravity with something more forgiving, but we can create structures that seem to defy it, like parachutes. In both case, we designed structures at higher level models to cope with the realities of the lower-level.

The second usage is that some of these fundamental models carry a wisdom that echos the realities of the everyday unseen. There is a concept in Physics called critical mass. It is when a nuclear reaction gets to a point when it is self-sustaining and needs no more input material to exist. Human habits work very much the same way. As we continue to reinforce them day after day with more will power input, we eventually hit a critical mass-like point when the habit is self-sustaining, and it requires no more will-power on our part. It becomes something we do with no input.

Likewise is the inflection point in a business when enough people are customers that they bring in enough new customers. Prior to that point, a new business will have to market and do promotional events to attract attention. If enough people consider the product good, they will market for you and your input in terms of attracting attention becomes much less.

The fundamental models are the basis for what is possible.

Taking A Leap Towards Innovation

We all want innovative ideas, a breakthrough, a better understanding, perhaps a better living situation. It’s very easy as humans to look at many things as static and unremarkable and just plain “that’s the way things are”, but very few concepts or ideas are actually like this. Most are built on layers of human choice where the original decision was just “Let’s maybe try this”, and then if it worked, it stuck. We want to dig deep beneath those layers to understand what is actually unchangeable and what many things above it are not.

Two things are required.

1. Understand both the major fundamental mental models and higher-level mental models at play. Then, practice looking for where they apply and deconstruct inventions, systems, concepts, and situations that you come across into these fundamental models.
2. Once we break them down into the things that do not change which comes from our understandings of the fundamental models, we build them back up and see if we can find better ways of achieving the same outcome possibly with some drastically different design decisions.

Look at things this way and life becomes an exciting experiment in interesting deconstruction of your surroundings, as your brain expands to see more possibilities.

Over the next few days, see if you can step back from your own thoughts and be slightly more mindful of the different mental models you hold of what is going on around you. Do it from a 3rd-person perspective. Try to ask a few more why questions of yourself about these models.

You are invited to have a look at Part 2 of the series where we’ll discuss building mental models and the nature of cross-discipline insight.

Thank You for reading!

Glossary of Terms and Relationships

A [Circumstance, Situation] is made up from one or more of a [force, contract, system, or invention]
A force is something very low level, like gravity or reciprocation tendency; typically it will not change
A contract is a shared human agreement. It can be as complex as the concept of money or as simple as an understanding of how we greet someone formally
A system is a human designed set of rules with a purpose, such as a train ticketing-system
An invention is a human built design with a purpose, such as an alarm clock
The purpose is the benefit of any real-world [force, contract, system, or invention] that produces some value for the world’s inhabitants
A Mental Model is a representation of a force, system, contract, or invention in your mind. It is how you understand it. There are higher level models, and then there are lower levels model closer to fundamental models. The level represents that degree that the model can change
A Fundamental Mental Model is a representation of a force that is unchanging, such as those taken from Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology or at a higher-level Psychology, Economics, or Engineering

Citations

[1]: Charlie Munger,(October 3, 2003). Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults After Considering Interdisciplinary Needs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY1eNlL6NKs