Mental Models

Beware of Too Much Information

May 25, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Better Decisions Beware of Too Much Information Nearly all decision-making models emphasize the need for much information about the situation and options before making a decision.

Information is worthwhile, no doubt, but information can sometimes be less factual or less precise than it may seem. Besides, too much information may distract you from important issues. Scouting for additional data may cloud the picture rather than arm you with crucial information.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the usefulness and truth-value of the information you have amassed. The solution to being overwhelmed by too much irrelevant information is selecting relevant information—not merely less information.

Bear in mind that there’s always room for new ideas and new perspectives. Review and challenge your current comprehension of the problem you’re confronting. Don’t be afraid to refine your understanding and explore other possibilities.

The Tyranny of Best Practices

May 9, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

By all means, acquaint yourself with the management practices of Dell (in supply chain management,) Toyota (quality control,) Ryanair (working capital,) or whatever company is the present-day shining exemplar of the pertinent best practices. But beware of the risks of taking their best practices out of context and applying them to your business.

The Tyranny of Best Practices - Deceptively Simplistic Solutions Some advantages are unlikely to be accrued by borrowing fashionable ideas from other companies. It makes sense, for example, to study how Apple’s innovations have changed the world, but the visionary in Steve Jobs can’t be replicated.

Best practices can offer deceptively simplistic solutions. Some of them aren’t implementable—even relatable. You can try replicating Google’s policy of allowing employees to spend 20% of their time on their own ideas; that initiative isn’t likely to transform a company designing gasoline engines.

Many of the basic principles of innovation are universal. But management methods succeed—or fail—in a specific context. A company’s industry, maturity, location, and leadership structures influence this context. Unless you develop a thorough understanding of all the factors that have contributed to others’ success, there’s a risk that you’re learning the wrong lessons.

Idea for Impact: You can’t truly become another company. You can only become a better version of yourself, not an inferior version of someone else. Be inspired by others’ best practices, but don’t imitate them blindly.

Intellectual Inspiration Often Lies in the Overlap of Disparate Ideas

January 20, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From David Chapman’s instructive essay ‘How to Think Real Good,’

Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.

Leonardo da Vinci---Renaissance man was as much a scientist as an artist I’ve always been an admirer of the “Renaissance Man”—the notion that one should try to embrace multiple streams of knowledge and develop one’s own faculties as broadly as possible. An archaeologist who studies only material culture will think similar thoughts to a second archaeologist who studies only material culture. However, an archaeologist whose studies include anthropology, biology, geology, and metallurgy has the wherewithal to pursue her curiosity down disparate channels and synthesize multiple perspectives.

Idea for Impact: Dabble in multiple disciplines from time to time and try to understand the basic thinking model of each discipline. You’ll think more broadly, redefine problems outside of normal boundaries, and reach solutions anchored in a unique understanding of complex situations.

Selling is About Solving Customer Problems

December 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The best salespeople don’t sway customers through manipulative games and mesmerizing presentations. Instead, they figure out how they can enhance a customers’ lives.

Selling is About Solving Customer Problems If customers believe their problems are real and, more importantly, if they understand them personally, they’re more likely to be persuaded by an image of a satisfying solution.

No product or service is excellent in and of itself. It’s only worthy if it fulfills customers’ needs.

Invest more time in the problem representation stage. Develop a fuller appreciation of your customers’ problems. Make the idea of paying money for the solutions seem natural. Induce consumers to fit your products and services into their long-held routines.

Idea for Impact: Focus on solving customer problems. Don’t find customers for your product. Find products for your customers.

Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success

August 14, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Why do some people reach ever-higher levels of achievement, while others struggle or just plug along?

Norman Vincent Peale, the doyen of the think-positive mindset, provides a particularly illustrative example in You Can If You Think You Can (1987):

In Tokyo, I once met an American, an inspiring man, from Pennsylvania. Crippled from some form of paralysis, he was on a round-the-world journey in a wheelchair, getting a huge kick out of all his experiences. I commented that nothing seemed to get him down. His reply was a classic: “It’s only my legs that are paralyzed. The paralysis never got into my mind.”

Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success No matter how formidable your talents, you’ll be held back by certain attitudes and behaviors that limit your achievements.

Your personal constraints—some of them beyond your control—will determine your level of success. Identify those constraints and make a plan to triumph over them.

Idea for Impact: The more you can reframe your attitudes toward the past, future, and present, the more likely you’ll find a meaningful life. Don’t let your constraints lay down what you can achieve.

Don’t Live in a World Ruled by Falsehoods

July 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” defined the American author Philip K. Dick.

Lying is second nature to us, and under the influence of improbable thinking, even idealism, we’ll hang ourselves if given enough rope. Rebekah Campbell of the New York Times observed,

A study by the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of adults could not have a 10-minute conversation without lying at least once. The same study found that 40 percent of people lie on their resumes and a whopping 90 percent of those looking for a date online lie on their profiles.

Most people lie about little things to make them look good. People lie to stave off the consequences of making a mistake, to buy more time or to spare someone’s feelings. Their hearts may be in the right place, but they are still telling lies.

Telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

Idea for Impact: Stop Living in a World of Illusions

Don't Live in a World Ruled by Falsehoods Live in the world of reality, not in the world of how you perceive reality.

Realistic thinking is grounded in an honest appraisal of all facts and data and conditions in different situations. Realistic thinking affords a clear-headed and conscious thought and behavior.

The great undertaking in life is to discover reality—to be truly honest and transparent with yourself about everything.

The meditation master Kalu Rinpoche wrote in The Dharma: That Illuminates All Beings Impartially Like the Light of the Sun and Moon (1986,)

You live in illusion, and the appearance of things.
There is a reality, but you do not know this.
When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing.
And being nothing, you are everything.
That is all.

Surrounded by Yes: Social Media and Elsewhere

June 18, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other media companies have built unbelievably powerful tools for collecting and organizing personal data. They’re developing and perfecting algorithms that track your activities and accumulate repositories of seemingly-trivial social media data.

They know whom you hang out with and what you like. And they can make extraordinarily good deductions about your demographics, social influences, political partisanship, social and economic preferences, and everything else. They’re influencing not just what content you see, but also which sites you visit in the first place.

These companies’ intentions are modest enough: to feed you the news you’re likely to want and to expose you to the kind of products and services you’re likely to respond to. The pages you’re shown are tailored for who you are, where you live, whom you interact with, and what you’ve previously clicked on.

The purveyors of the internet make money from advertising and paid subscriptions. Their goal is stickiness: they need traffic to thrive and prosper. Their success depends on their ability to draw you, keep you longer, and persuade you to return before you choose to leave.

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

There’s a dangerous consequence here. What you should realize is that Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become gatekeepers of everything you see on the internet. Their content filtering and recommender systems are substituting editorial judgment. They’re not neutral and, given their economic objectives, often serve to amplify your biases.

The problem with filtering and recommender systems is that everybody likes them. The content you’re fed with is, in a sense, an endless stream of affirmations that you’re right—you’ll see more of what you’re interested in and associate with others who share your viewpoints. The consensus view is reinforced—the world seems to agree with you. Everything feels more normal!

On a broader scale, as people converge to likeminded people in virtual neighborhoods, you tend to operate in an intellectual bubble. Left to all these devices of today’s information-consumption patterns, much of your opinions and judgments are subjective, imprecise, incomplete, narrow-minded, or utterly unapprised.

All this has made it difficult for you to seek out contrasting views even if you feel so disposed. When you do venture out, all you’ll see are trolls who get offended by the slightest of disagreements—any attempt to challenge their beliefs is taken as a grievous insult. These trolls resort to bumper sticker-rhetoric, name-calling, demeaning attacks, and ill-informed declarations.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

Reach out. Consider alternative world-views that may cause you to philosophize differently. Find well-intentioned, respectful people who can challenge your viewpoints. Associate with ideological challengers who can help you improve your understanding of conflicting perspectives.

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (2008,) neurologist and author Robert Burton argues that certainty is an emotion just like anger, passion, or sorrow. Once you develop a “that’s right” disposition about a subject matter, your brain subconsciously protects you from wasting its processing effort on problems for which it has already found a solution that you believe is good enough, and is continuously reinforced. In other words, your cerebral laziness could subconsciously lead you to “do less” by simply embracing a cast-iron certainty rather than re-examining your assumptions.

Don’t be lazy. Doggedly examine your biases and prejudices.

Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future // Books in Brief

May 8, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In Five Minds for the Future (2006,) developmental psychologist Howard Gardner argues that succeeding in a rapidly evolving world requires five proficiencies:

The Disciplinary Mind: “Individuals without one or more disciplines will not be able to succeed at any demanding workplace and will be restricted to menial tasks.”
The Synthesizing Mind: “Individuals without synthesizing capabilities will be overwhelmed by information and unable to make judicious decisions about personal or professional matters.”
The Creating Mind: “Individuals without creating capacities will be replaced by computers and will drive away those who have the creative spark.”
The Respectful Mind: “Individuals without respect will not be worthy of respect by others and will poison the workplace and the commons.”
The Ethical Mind: “Individuals without ethics will yield a world devoid of decent workers and responsible citizens: none of us will want to live on that desolate planet.”

Gardner is best known for his work on multiple intelligences—the theory that cast serious doubts about the simplistic concept of a “single” intelligence, measurable by something like IQ. Gardner’s notion that “there is more than one way to learn” has transformed education in the U.S. and around the world.

Recommendation: Speed-read Five Minds for the Future. Written through the lens of a skills-development policymaker, Gardner’s theses and prescriptions aren’t ground-breaking but make for thoughtful reflection. Complement with Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind (1991; summary.)

Five Where Only One is Needed: How Airbus Avoids Single Points of Failure

April 6, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In my case study of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft’s anti-stall mechanism, I examined how relying on data from only one Angle-of-Attack (AoA) sensor caused two accidents and the aircraft’s consequent grounding.

A single point of failure is a system component, which, upon failure, renders the entire system unavailable, dysfunctional, or unreliable. In other words, if a bunch of things relies on one component within your system, and that component breaks, you are counting the time to a catastrophe.

Case Study: How Airbus Builds Multiple Redundancies to Minimize Single Points of Failure

As the Boeing 737 MAX disaster has emphasized, single points of failure in products, services, and processes may spell disaster for organizations that have not adequately identified and mitigated these critical risks. Reducing single points of failure requires a thorough knowledge of the vital systems and processes that an organization relies on to be successful.

How Airbus Avoids Single Points of Failure Since the dawn of flying, reliance on one sensor has been anathema.

The Airbus A380 aircraft, for example, features 100,000 different wires—that’s 470 km of cables weighing some 5700 kg. Airbus’s wiring includes double or triple redundancy to mitigate the risk of single points of failure caused by defect wiring (e.g., corrosion, chafing of isolation or loose contact) or cut wires (e.g., through particles intruding aircraft structure as in case of an engine burst.)

The Airbus fly-by-wire flight control system has quadruplex redundancy i.e., it has five flight control computers where only one computer is needed to fly the aircraft. Consequently, an Airbus aircraft can afford to lose four of these computers and still be flyable. Of the five flight control computers, three are primary computers and two are secondary (backup) computers. The primary and the secondary flight control computers use different processors, are designed and supplied by different vendors, feature different chips from different manufacturers, and have different software systems developed by different teams using different programming languages. All this redundancy reduces the probability of common hardware- and software-errors that could lead to system failure.

Redundancy is Expensive but Indispensable

The multiple redundant flight control computers continuously keep track of each other’s output. If one computer produces deviant results for some reason, the flight control system as a whole excludes the results from that aberrant computer in determining the appropriate actions for the flight controls.

How Airbus Avoids Single Points of Failure: Multiple Redundant Flight Control Computers By replicating critical sensors, computers, and actuators, Airbus provides for a “graceful degradation” state, where essential facilities remain available, allowing the pilot to fly and land the plane. If an Airbus loses all engine power, a ram air turbine can power the aircraft’s most critical systems, allowing the pilot to glide and land the plane (as happened with Air Transat Flight 236.)

Idea for Impact: Build redundancy to prevent system failure from the breakdown of a single component

When you devise a highly reliable system, identify potential single points of failure, and investigate how these risks and failure modes can be mitigated.

For every component of a product or a service you work on, identify single points of failure by asking, “If this component fails, does the rest of the system still work, and, more importantly, does it still do the function it is supposed to do?”

Add redundancy to the system so that failure of any component does not mean failure of the entire system.

If you can’t build redundancy into a system due to some physical or operational complexity, establish frequent inspections and maintenance to keep the system reliable.

Postscript: In people-management, make sure that no one person has sole custody of some critical institutional knowledge, creativity, reputation, or experience that makes him indispensable to the organization’s business continuity and its future performance. If he/she should leave, the organization suffers the loss of that valued standing and expertise. See my article about this notion of key-person dependency risk, the threat posed by an organization, or a team’s over-reliance on one or a few individuals.

Why People under Pressure Choose Self-Interested Behaviors

January 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi

Why People under Pressure Choose Self-Interested Behaviors Pressure can put people in a state of threat. As I’ve examined previously here, here, and here, pressure can undermine people’s ability to make sound decisions.

Under pressure, people can abandon their inhibitions, cut corners, and loosen up their moral standards. In other words, they are more likely to engage in self-centered behaviors as opposed to pursuing the common good.

People adopt moral standards that dissuade them from unacceptable behaviors. Under normal circumstances, they think sensibly about the costs and benefits when making decisions. However, under pressure, people can be depleted of the cognitive resources they need to act ethically and resist temptations. See my article on the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower.

When people are in that state of emotional and psychological anxiety, the brain goes into a defensive mode. With that, they are more likely to engage in self-interested behaviors that they would otherwise avoid, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high, and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

Mental Models

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Idea for Impact: Stop Living in a World of Illusions

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Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

Wondering what to read next?

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Case Study: How Airbus Builds Multiple Redundancies to Minimize Single Points of Failure

Redundancy is Expensive but Indispensable

Idea for Impact: Build redundancy to prevent system failure from the breakdown of a single component

Wondering what to read next?

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