A Latticework of Mental Models

  • Building one’s lattice (network of connections and mental models) is a lifelong project. Persevere and you will find that your ability to understand reality and making wise decisions will improve.
  • What are the mental models? Mental models allow us to understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and what we understand, but they also shape the connections and opportunities that emerge. Mental models are a way of simplifying complexity, because we consider some things more important than others. A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all the details of the world in our heads, so we use models to simplify the complexity into understandable and organisable fragments.
  • The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models we have at hand and their usefulness in the current situation. The more models you have (the bigger your toolbox will be), the more likely you will have the right models to see reality.
  • Most people prefer to be specialists. Each specialist sees something different. By default, a typical engineer will think in systems. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. By bringing these disciplines to the forefront, we can navigate a problem in a three-dimensional way. If we only examine the problem in one way, we have blind spots. And the blind spots can lead us to make big mistakes.
  • Here there is another way of thinking that is broader and richer. When a botanist looks at a forest, he can focus on the ecosystem, an ecologist sees the impact of climate change, a forestry engineer the stage of tree growth and a businessman the value of the land. None of them are wrong, but none of them are able to describe the whole forest. Sharing knowledge or learning the basic concepts of other disciplines would lead to a more complete understanding that would allow better initial decisions on forest management.

Having mental models and a mental structure of the Latticework approach is like having an excellent toolbox. our personal toolbox, which is organised and has tools that make it possible to open, close and relate with other ideas and ambits.

It is one thing to have data, it is another thing to have information (which is never perfect), it is more complicated to have orderly and comprehensible knowledge, and it is much more complicated to have “insight” and wisdom from knowledge. With a Latticework approach mental structure it is more accessible to move from information to knowledge and from knowledge to vision and eventually to the final outcome on those things that are important.