Business Articles

From Shane Parrish's Decision by Design Course Second Order Thinking We often miss opportunities when we don’t ask the question “And then what might happen?” And we often miss inevitable problems when we don’t ask “What are the potential consequences?” As part of our...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" Falsifiability Karl Popper wrote “A theory is part of empirical science if and only if it conflicts with possible experiences and is therefore in principle falsifiable by experience.” "The idea here is that if you can’t...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" Inversion "Inversion is a powerful tool to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success. The root of inversion is “invert,” which means to upend or turn upside down. As a thinking...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" Second Order Thinking "Second-order thinking is thinking farther ahead and thinking holistically. It requires us to not only consider our actions and their immediate consequences, but the subsequent effects of those...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" First Principles Thinking "First principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated situations and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called reasoning from first principles, it’s a tool to...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" The Map is not the Territory "The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent." "We use maps every day. They help us navigate from one city to...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" Probabilistic Thinking "Probabilistic thinking is essentially trying to estimate, using some tools of math and logic, the likelihood of any specific outcome coming to pass. It is one of the best tools we have to improve...

Form Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models." Causation vs Correlation "Confusion between these two terms often leads to a lot of inaccurate assumptions about the way the world works. We notice two things happening at the same time (correlation) and mistakenly...

From Shane Parrish's "The Great Mental Models" Circle of Competence "When ego and not competence drives what we undertake, we have blind spots. If you know what you understand, you know where you have an edge over others. When you are honest about where your knowledge...

From Kahneman's "Noise" The Mediating Assessment Protocol. (From page 299) At the beginning of the process, structure the decision into mediating assessments. (For recurring judgments, this is done only once.) Ensure that whenever possible, mediating assessments use...