Harry 0:00

The mental model is a construct, in effect, of assumptions, which are uncritically held beliefs that are supported by hidden unconscious commitments that you have, and then how you manifest those as behavior or lack of behavior.

Narrator 0:24

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:34

Harry, it's good to see you.

Harry 0:35

Ah, it's great to see you again, Jorge.

Jorge 0:38

Feels like it's been a while since we last talked. How are things going for you?

Harry 0:43

Things are good. I mean, we've come off all the fires all over California and that's been interesting to say the least. And here we are, sliding into the new year with a new form of government, I think. Not quite sure what's going on there, but trying to keep an open mind, stay curious.

Jorge 1:09

We had a conversation about dealing with the unprecedented, right? And as I've been watching the news, that conversation has been echoing in my ears. So much of what we've talked about feels to me is about gaining greater... I was gonna use the phrase self-awareness.

Harry 1:32

Mm-hmm

Jorge 1:33

So that you can have greater agency. The one thing one can't do is panic and become paralyzed or hysterical or something. And then, you can't act skillfully.

Harry 1:44

Yeah. Staying present is definitely the challenge and whether you're at home or whether you're working with your team or whether you're in some larger organizational context, staying present and open open-hearted, open-minded and looking at the facts as they are not, as they "should be."

Jorge 2:07

Or appear to be, right?

Harry 2:09

Right. Yeah. These are the challenges in these days.

Jorge 2:12

Yeah, how do we see clearly? That feels to me like a good segue. I have something I wanna read to you. I actually have a physical book here, which is unusual for me these days. But I will read from this thing.

Harry 2:27

Okay, go for it.

Jorge 2:29

"It's midnight, and you hear a loud radio in the apartment downstairs. Last week, the quiet old man who lived there passed away and you've been concerned about the arrival of the next tenant. You never know who might move in, and you've heard some real horror stories from your college friends. In an apartment house, the wrong neighbors can make your life miserable. "Now, your worst fears have come true. The rock music plays on and on. You toss and turn looking at the clock, it's 12:30 AM You decide to wait just a little longer. Even if your new neighbor is a jerk, you are reluctant to turn your first meeting into a fight. At 1:00 AM, the radio is blasting just as loud. What kind of party are they throwing down there? You've got to get up for work tomorrow. How can a person be so ignorant? So you walk down to lecture this idiot to common courtesy. You knock heavily on the door and it swings open. "You are surprised to find the apartment completely bare. There is no sign of your new neighbor. There isn't even a sign of furniture. So you walk in. In the back room, you find some drop cloths and paint cans. Plugged into one wall, you see a boombox cranked up full. "There is no neighbor, just a careless painter who left the radio on when he left for the day. The new tenant hasn't even arrived yet. The ignorant neighbor that you you invented based on the noise vanishes into air, but the anger and other emotions you felt are still very real. "You have trouble settling down and going back to sleep because you're still angry at this neighbor. A neighbor who exists only in your mind. You created this evil figure to explain the loud music, and he took on a life of his own. If you hadn't gone down and knocked on the door, you might have lived with this illusion for days. "Your mental models shape the way you see the world. They help you to quickly make sense of the noises that filter in from outside, but they can also limit your ability to see the true picture. They are with you always and like your neighbors can be a great help or can keep you up at night without reason."

Harry 5:04

Wow. Man, so many things popped into my head. I don't know the work. What is the book?

Jorge 5:14

This is a book called The Power of Impossible Thinking and the subtitle is Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business. And it's by Yoram I hope I pronounce that right Jerry Wind and Colin Crook with Robert Gunther. And this is a book published by Wharton. It's a book about mental models, basically. And that's what I was hoping we would talk about today, because mental models is one of those ideas that is central to the work of design and those of us who do this kind of work develop means to try to understand people's mental models and to influence people's mental models. And it feels like one of those design superpowers that maybe other folks would benefit from understanding and practicing.

Harry 6:16

Wow. I'm just writing a couple things down here. Have you ever done any work with Indi Young?

Jorge 6:24

I've interviewed Indi for my previous podcast. I haven't worked with her directly, but I admire her work. And she did write a book called Mental Models, right?

Harry 6:32

Yeah. the reason a fourth [inaudble] things just jumped into my head all at once. And like one of those pens with four colors, that you get to select one color at a time. Like, I kept in my brain, kept trying to push them all up at the same time and it all just stopped. But the one that managed to get to the top was when I was at Rackspace. So I was the, the VP of experience design at Rackspace when we were building the open cloud. Hired Indi to come in, help us build out a mental model because we had a fairly complicated and complex challenge that we needed to get out of one mental frame and into another. And my first experience moving from the concept and idea of a mental model to the practice and the map of a mental model was working with Indi and it was really illuminating. Anyway, Indy came in and helped my team build out a very sophisticated mental model for how to think about cloud computing from the point of view of a business user. And it was really the first time that I had a structure for how to think about a mental model. And that was the kind of the first thing that managed to pop up through the pen into the tip was, model as a concept before working with Indi just like these two words that were very... not ephemeral, but very abstract. And, then working with her, it turned into a very concrete way of thinking about who is involved in something and what do they want and need in that context, and what would they go about doing to achieve what they want and need in that context, which is interestingly, very similar to prioritization. So that was the, very first thought of going from this abstract idea of what mental models are to my first, I think, concrete experience in having an output, a big map, right? It was, I don't know, probably eight feet long and four feet tall of printer paper posted on the inside of a wall at Rackspace, where we could all see what people... what we hallucinated they wanted to do, and what the research about who these users were, the characteristics and attributes of their persona, what the tasks were that they were trying to accomplish, and so on and so forth. Anyway, that was the first thing that jumped to mind.

Jorge 9:22

One of Indi's many contributions to the field of interaction design, user experience design more broadly, is turning this kind of somewhat vague idea about mental models into an artifact that, to your point, that people can point at and discuss and see where things come from. It's been many years since I read that book, but as I recall, the charismatic table that often gets shown in slides and stuff has to do with someone doing their morning routine if I'm not mistaken, right? They get up and then they do their morning toilet, and then they do their breakfast. And you can map out the things they're doing and you could investigate what they're thinking as they're going about doing that, right? And then from that you might start making some assumptions about how that person thinks of that particular situation and the things they can and cannot do there.

Harry 10:27

Yeah, absolutely. Another place it jumped was, I've been following Farnam Street and Shane Parrish's work for a long time I don't think it was a month ago that I actually got my four-book set. The different colors, his book set called Mental Models, right? It's all the different frameworks and approaches for thinking about thinking, AKA mental models. And I'm, so excited to at some point crack open. I think it's volume one, the red version, ,and start digging into that to look at it from a different point of view. Like, rather than looking at it through the lens of personas and what they're trying to accomplish and what the tasks are and how they approach things and perhaps what assumptions they're making and in this more formalistic approach to mental modeling. I'm super excited about digging in, going in from the bottom up as it were, and maybe looking through the lens of primitives, if you will, the pieces of mental models or possibly the contributing components in mental models in hopes of trying to build, not just this top down way I have of thinking about it now, largely from Indi, but a more bottoms up oriented version that might be able to exploit many of the tools that I've developed and you and I'm sure use in our practice. The other thing I thought of while you were talking was, I remember I took a class in college, it was a social psychology class with Elliot Aronson. He co-authored a book with a woman named Caroll Tavris called Mistakes Were Made, But Not By Me, which is for a long time one of my favorite books. And it was really looking at kind of the mechanics of self-deception and how to think about the role of cognitive dissonance in how we perhaps move through the world in a way that is arguably easier so long as the way that we're moving through the world is aligned with who we think we are. And when we start running into friction with how we think or how we're behaving because it's in conflict with who we think we are, even at a very unconscious level, that creates this dissonance. And the book really outlines this fantastic way of thinking about how we go about doing things that seemingly are so incongruent to how we would otherwise think of ourselves and what we're approaching.

Jorge 13:30

I, wanna circle back to that, but, but I want to take a step back here, because I was actually very glad that you brought up Shane Parish's work. I do not have the physical books, I did buy the ebooks. Again, But the reason I'm glad you brought that up is because I suspect that most people who have heard the phrase mental models today have heard it through Shane's work.

Harry 13:55

Uh.

Jorge 13:56

He's certainly the person who I think of as writing the most about this more recently. And I think that his usage is different from Indi's. He uses it in the sense of Charlie Munger. But I think that Indi's usage of mental models, it's about how a particular person, an individual, sees a particular part of their world. Like I said, how do you think about the beginning of your day, right? Like you're making breakfast and stuff like that. And there's certain things that you do and certain things that you expect to be there. And as a designer, you try to understand the mental models that people have about the domain that you are designing for. I did a project where we were designing a system that was meant to be used by neurosurgeons to diagnose traumatic brain injuries. The users of such a system bring a very particular mindset, and you have to understand how those folks see the world to be able to design that system. That is one usage of mental model. And that's what I think of as the traditional design usage of mental models. I think that the Charlie Munger/Shane Parrish usage conceives of mental models as thinking tools. So a mental model is some kind of shortcut that you have in your mind to help you think about something, right?

Harry 15:24

Yeah, that's why I was calling them primitives. I was trying to get at that same idea, but maybe use the wrong word.

Jorge 15:30

right. Well, but I think it's important to call out because if you heard the phrase "mental models" through Shane's work, and then we're talking about the stuff that Indi does, it might not be connecting, because they are very different things. And it might be that the person who's making their breakfast does have mental models of the sort that Shane writes about. But there are different focuses. Now, to circle back to what you were saying just before I interrupted you, what I was hearing there is that it would be helpful for somebody to have good models of their own mental models.

Harry 16:11

And that's especially true... like, in the work that we did with Indi, it wasn't so much about the mental model of the people doing the work, it was the people, myself included, who were trying to design a solution, needed to understand the breadth of how all these smaller mental models would fit together. The beginning of the day example was like one category in this broad model. And the thing is, in order to design the entire experience we needed to have not just the morning, but we needed to have the day, and not just the day, but we needed to have the week and we needed to have it from multiple stakeholders. We needed to be able to come at it from multiple points of view. And so it was in effect a meta mental model. And a piece of it might have been the kind of mental model that you were describing. But the whole mental model that we built was really a meta version of that. And so, when I think about Indi's work, I think about mental modeling more than I think about a mental model.

Jorge 17:31

One way that I've put that in the past is that the "deliverable" the diagram that comes out the other end might be of use in that it helps designers structure the product or whatever. But it's the process at arriving at that diagram that has real value. The questions that you have to ask, the research that you have to do, it will in some ways force you to confront aspects of the context and perhaps the thing that you're making to fit into that context that you would not have encountered otherwise.

Harry 18:21

Yeah. And as I was reflecting on this, it occurred to me that in the executive coaching/psychological domain, there is a similar approach. It's called the Immunity to Change model by Leahy and Kegan, I think it is. The Immunity to Change model and there is a book on the subject really looks at the types of assumptions that underpin the behaviors that you're either demonstrating or not demonstrating, that are preventing you from getting closer to what you want, such that you can challenge those assumptions as uncritically held beliefs to determine to what extent those assumptions are or are not true, which allows you then to build a plan to get different results. And so, I had never made that connection before, but Immunity to Change as a model is a mental modeling activity. And it's very powerful for working with people one-on-one. And I suppose it could be applied at an organizational or a team level to generate change as well.

Jorge 19:41

Have you seen an example that might illustrate how that approach works?

Harry 19:47

I've used it in my work fairly extensively, but only at the individual level. So the Immunity to Change model is a mental modeling tool, and it is a very simple, yet incredibly powerful mechanism for identifying the things that we're... The Immunity to Change people, their business is called Minds At Work, but the Immunity to Change people refer to those as hidden commitments. So these are things that you're committed to doing because it's how you go about getting the results that you're getting today, even if those are at odds with the results that you would like to have in the future. So the Immunity Map, which is the one of the two central tools that Immunity to Change presents is a four column model that starts with column one, it's your commitment. It's the thing that you really want to change. It's really the one thing that you are really motivated to change. It is not for the, faint of heart, right? Column two is, what are you doing or not doing today? So this is your as-is state and the things that you're doing today might or might not be helping you achieve your goal and the things you're not doing today might or might not be helping you to achieve your goal, but the aggregate set of things that you're doing and not doing are not pushing you forward fast enough to get the goal that you're highly motivated to get. The third column is what they characterize as these hidden commitments. And these are the things that you're committed to pursuing because this is the structure of the... it's the glue of your mental model, in a sense, right? I have this goal, but I'm doing or not doing these things. And when I look at why I'm doing these things, I can tell you I have a hidden commitment to pursuing these things I'm doing because of these beliefs I have. And then the fourth column is what are the big assumptions that sit underneath that. I have an example here. So commitment. So I wanna, here's a, here's an example of an improvement goal. I wanna secure meaningful work that allows me to provide for my family. Right now, this is a client I was working with who, a very senior level person who was successfully working in an arena where they didn't feel it was meaningful and finding work that paid enough was, in their mind, in conflict with meaningful work. So their commitment, their improvement goal was to secure meaningful work that allows them to provide for their family. And in the column two, what are they doing or not doing? So an example is, I'm trying to prove myself to people who hold power. So I want to be validated by them. Just happens to be a thing that this person's doing. He's kissing up in a sense, right? And here's a thing that he's not doing: he's not calling people from his past professionally, so he's not mining his network. And it turns out in this case, because he doesn't have a story that he feels comfortable with. And so, if you look at the hidden commitments, one of them is he worries that he'd have another negative work experience. He's worried that if he goes and takes another job, it's gonna be another place where he gets paid well, but it's soul sucking. And so, the way that the Immunity to Change people look at this is a hidden commitment is, he's committed to having negative work experiences in his current model, right? He's demonstrating that. He's had two jobs in a row, two senior level jobs, where he has gotten the job, and it pays well, but it's a negative experience because it's not meaningful. He's committed to that. But it's an unconscious commitment. And in this particular case, I didn't pull up a more complete version of the map, but an assumption underneath that might have been that finding meaningful work that pays enough is not possible. That might be an assumption. And so the Immunity to Change model says, "Okay, your job here is to test that assumption." But in order to test that assumption, you have to know what that assumption is. In order to identify that assumption, you have to understand what you're committed to unconsciously, right? In order to understand what your unconscious commitments are, you have to look at what you're doing and not doing because that demonstrates the activity that supports the hidden commitment, that essentially confirms the assumption and it is inconsistent with the goal. So the only way to get out of this loop is to test the assumptions and find out that they are, in fact, either not true or they are true, which whatever happens to be the case for you. Or to what degree are they either true or not true such that you might be able to challenge them at the level of your mental model. So the mental model is a construct, in effect, of assumptions, which are uncritically held beliefs that are supported by hidden unconscious commitments that you have, and then how you manifest those as behavior or lack of behavior. And that's this other way of thinking about a mental model as well. It's super powerful for generating change.

Jorge 26:16

It sounds like a tool to make the invisible visible in service to coherence. You have the stated goals, but then you also... it's like, "I wanna lose weight, but I also love ice cream," right? And those two things are in conflict. And as you were describing it reminded me, our common friend Dave Gray, wrote a book called Liminal Thinking that has a, similar framework, right? I forget exactly what Dave's framework is, but I remember it having the things that you do being influenced by the things that you think being influenced by the things you believe, and there's these very deep layers. And it behooves you it behooves us to try to bring them out to the fore where you can admit that you do have a conflict there, which is keeping you from gaining traction.

Harry 27:16

That's exactly right. That's a hundred percent right. Oh, I love that. because this is the entire point. And the entire point is if you can surface this stuff from the unconscious to the conscious and you can connect it with tools to make it possible to get from a current as-is state to a future to-be state, that's how you get traction. And then, you can move from getting traction to getting momentum. And from momentum to getting velocity. And then you're really moving, or cooking with gas as they say.

Jorge 27:56

We're not gonna be able to top that. Let's, let's wrap it there. as always, I learned so much from our conversations. That feels like a really useful model to look into. Thank you so much.

Harry 28:08

Wow. That was a good one. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Narrator 28:17

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes@tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.