Business Psychology Decision-Making

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models (Summary)

by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann

To solve the problem of venomous cobras in colonial Delhi, the British government offered a cash bounty for every dead snake. The plan worked, at first. But then, enterprising locals began breeding cobras just to kill them for the reward. When the government scrapped the program, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes, and the cobra problem became worse than ever. This is the 'Cobra Effect,' a classic example of how a solution can unintentionally worsen the problem it was designed to fix.

To Succeed, First Imagine Complete Failure

Instead of only planning for success, use the mental model of 'inversion' to work backward from a disastrous outcome. By identifying all the potential causes of failure upfront, you can proactively defend against them.

Before launching a major project, a team can conduct a 'premortem.' They imagine it’s one year in the future and the project has failed spectacularly. Each person then writes down every reason they can think of for this failure. This process uncovers hidden risks and assumptions that a normal planning session would miss.

Assume Stupidity Before Malice

Hanlon's Razor is a mental model that advises us not to attribute to malicious intent what can be adequately explained by carelessness, incompetence, or a simple mistake. It's a powerful tool for reducing conflict and paranoia.

If a colleague sends you a terse, one-word email, your initial reaction might be to think they're angry or dismissing you. Hanlon's Razor suggests a more likely explanation: they were probably just busy, replying on their phone between meetings, and didn't have time for a more detailed message.

Your Brain Confuses 'Easy to Remember' with 'Likely to Happen'

The 'Availability Heuristic' is our mental shortcut of overestimating the importance of information that is recent, vivid, and easy to recall. This distorts our perception of risk and probability.

After the movie Jaws was released, fear of swimming in the ocean spiked dramatically. People canceled beach vacations and avoided the water, even though the statistical risk of a shark attack remained infinitesimally small. The vivid, terrifying images from the film were more 'available' to people's minds than the boring data on drowning in swimming pools, which is a far more common danger.

Look for the Ripple Effects

First-order thinking considers only the immediate consequence of an action. Second-order thinking, a much more powerful tool, forces you to ask, 'And then what?' to uncover the cascading, downstream consequences.

A city decides to ban plastic grocery bags to help the environment (first-order effect). But this leads to a massive increase in the production of paper and cotton tote bags (second-order effect), which can have an even larger carbon and water footprint than the plastic bags they replaced, undermining the original goal.

Go deeper into these insights in the full book:
Buy on Amazon
Listen to the full audio book with an Audible Free Trial.
As an Amazon Associate, qualifying purchases help support this site.