Keeping Your Models Relevant
Off to the Races
The horses are already out of the starting gate. Your life and your business continue to race forward. You have placed your bet on a given model, and it has probably served you well up until now. Is it time to change horses? How do you avoid making the mistakes that GEC made in shifting its business and mental models? How do you know when to switch horses? How do you avoid backing the wrong horse or making a series of bad leaps?
Even under the best of circumstances, not all your bets will pay off. The story of Lord Simpson’s decisions in this chapter, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, is not intended as a personal critique. Everyone has made similar—although perhaps less dramatic— mistakes.The important question is: What can you learn going forward?
Given that mental models determine your reality, it is your understanding of your mental models—and knowing when to change them—that determines your opportunities for success and your risks of failure. The chapters that follow discuss this process of building bridges between old and new mindsets, engaging in adaptive experimentation and managing the challenge of complexity. Through these and other approaches, we can recognize the need to change and move in directions that are neither a leap nor in the dark.
- In what ways are your current mental models working? In what ways are they failing? Do you need to switch horses?
- What are some new models you might adopt to rethink your business or personal life?
- What are some low-cost, low-risk ways to test these models through experimentation before adopting them wholeheartedly?
You need to keep your drawers stocked with pencils, ballpoints, fountain pens, writing paper, a phone at the ready and a computer and printer, wired to the Internet. With all these options available on your desk and desktop, you are not a prisoner of a certain world view—locked in the castle of a particular paradigm surrounded by a moat to prevent attacks. Instead, you give yourself a passport to travel freely among different paradigms, seeing the sights, crossing back and forth along the bridges, gaining new perspectives and choosing the best path to your goal.
- What is your current portfolio of mental models that you use to address challenges?
- Look at some of the old mental models that you have discarded.
What is their potential value, and where can they best be applied? (For example, if you are sending all your correspondence via e-mail, when would a personal note be more effective?) - What are the strengths and weaknesses of each model? How could the abandoned models still be used in new ways?
- How can you expand your portfolio by adding new models?
