What are Mental Models and why do we need them?

We can become better thinkers and decision makers if we understand what mental models are, learn the mental models from across disciplines and use them in our daily life. We are all specialists in one field or another and look at every problem from our lens, often without even realizing.

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This world is a lot more complex than we know – for us to make sense of, to think and to make better decisions.

We are all specialists in one field or the other. When we see a problem to solve or have a decision to make, we approach it from the point of view of our own discipline. That is, we use a model in our head that we have learned at school or at work or somewhere else.

But when we look at a problem in just one way, we get into blind spots. We make decisions that are perfectly right in our own sense of the world, but get blindsided to other’s views. We eventually torture the reality to make it fit to our view.

“To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

A botanist sees a forest differently from an environmentalist, or from a forestry engineer or even from a business man. Each are right in their view individually, but wrong, while seen from a larger sense of the world.

This may sound like common sense that we need a well rounded view but actually is the most difficult thing to practice in life. More often than not we don’t even realize when we are blind sided.

But with the right tools we can make a beginning. As always, there are no shortcuts, and it is a life long journey to think better.

Mental Models

Mental models – made popular by Charlie Munger in his famous 1994 speech to USC business school – try to get you out of this blind spots in your thinking. As he says, you have to hang all the experience you got over years, on a lattice work of mental models. Only then it comes together into an usable form for you.

A mental model is an explanation of how things work. It is a lens through which we understand this world, make connections, sort out the relevant from irrelevant and reason with others. We simplify things in a way we can understand by using the mental models.

So if we are already using these mental models in our daily life, what is that we need to do better ?

Our quality of thinking suffers when we use mental models from just those one or two disciplines that we understand well. But all the wisdom in the world is not to be found in one or two disciplines.

We can all become better thinkers and decision makers by expanding the set of mental models that we use – across different disciplines. Developing a broad base of mental models in our head will alter our perception and behavior; will help us to think clearly, rationally and effectively.

There are a few dozen mental models – about 80 to 90 of them, that we can master over our lifetime to better understand reality and to make better decisions.

You can start by reading about the mental models already identified by experts from a wide range of disciplines. Most of them are simple, high-school concepts but applying them in our life is a different ball game altogether.