Radical Candor as fallback notch locatorfour days beforeHave you ever experienced this really fun moment when a few of…Tension in Shared Mental Model Space

Intention and shared mental model space2021Hamilton Helmer pointed out this amazing connection between intention and shared mental…Jankless2021As we Orient, examining our prediction error and updating our model of…Say it in many different ways2021Shared mental model spaces are challenging to grow and expand. Mental models,…Rigor and shared mental model space2021Alex Komoroske has another great set of new cards on rigor and…This just occurred to me today, so I am writing this down while it’s fresh. When I talk about the shared mental model space (SMMS), I usually picture it as something like a bunch of circles, one for each individual within a group, and these circles are touching a larger circle that represents the mental models that are shared by all members of the group. It’s not the most accurate diagram, but it will work for this thought experiment. As I was reflecting on the desired properties of a SMMS, I realized that there’s a tension at play.

The Relationship Polarity2021

Touching infinity2022As we explore the process of understanding, it may not be immediately…The Upper Limit Of Understanding2019Walking down the yellow-brick road of everything being storytelling, I stumbled into…On one hand, I want my organization’s SMMS to be large enough to allow us to understand each other, to be “on the same page” so to say. At the same time, I am recognizing that a SMMS that perfectly encloses all of the individuals’ mental models is both impossible and undesirable. It is impossible, because in trying to achieve perfect closure, we encounter the paradox of understanding: since everyone’s internal mental model also includes the enclosed models themselves, we rapidly descend into the hall-of-mirrors situation. It is undesirable, because a team where all of the opinions are known and completely understood is only facing inward. There is no new information coming in. So there appears to be a sort of polarity in the size of the shared mental model space – and a tension it embodies.

The law of tightening aperture2023What happens to the teams with wide apertures over time? Does the…Organizing and sensing connections2021Tucked away in a couple of paragraphs of the brilliant paper by…A SMMS can both work for and against the organization. As it grows, the organization becomes more blind to the externalities. A cult enforces the suffocating breadth of SMMS among its members, since that’s what makes it impervious to change. As SMMS shrinks, the organization stops being an organization. If the diversity of perspectives is high, but there’s no way to share them, we no longer have a team. It’s just a bunch of people milling around.

The third option2024The deeper insight here is that we are surrounded by polarities. Behind…Pace layers of predictability2023One thing that stood out to me was this notion of a…Nudges, boosts, bumpers, and tilts2023Using these two properties as axes, we can draw a nice –…The weird thing about polarities is that the sweet spot in the middle is elusive. Sitting right in the middle of the tension, it’s more likely to be periodically passed by the team — “OMG, this was amazing! Wait, where did it go?” — rather than having the team settle down in it. Even more annoyingly, diminishing the SMMS decreases the chances of reestablishing it — and large SMMS makes introducing new perspectives impossible. Both extremes are “sticky,” which means once an organization moves past some threshold, only a severe external perturbation can dislodge the state of its SMMS.

What the heck is strategy work?2022We turn the mastermind toward frameworks. The key objective of this role…Mental models2022I use the term “mental models” a lot, and so I figured…The cost of opinionsix days afterIt appears that I’ve been writing this essay since 2012, never quite…So it appears that it really matters how we decide to establish this space where our mental models are shared, and how we garden this space. The thing that becomes more and more evident to me is that if we do so in an unexamined way, we are unlikely to have a sustainable, resilient organization.