The Most Innovative Leaders Use These 3 Mental Models to Unlock Their Best Ideas

In a world wherever GPS is simply a thumb changeable away, astir group return maps for granted. It's difficult to fathom that nan oldest surviving maps had small to do pinch reality. The Babylonian Map of nan World, for example, was a clay tablet astir nan size of a first-generation iPhone. Created betwixt 700 and 500 BC, nan representation shows Babylon successful nan middle, pinch nan Euphrates River cutting done nan halfway and nan water connected each sides. As Smithsonian Magazine explains, it wasn't a representation for navigation — much of a measurement for nan map-holder to understand nan thought of nan world astir them. Accuracy was an afterthought.

It would beryllium hundreds of years earlier an astronomer and astrologer named Claudius Ptolemy attempted nan first realistic representation — a two-dimensional depiction of what Ptolemy understood to beryllium a spherical Earth. This is simply a premier illustration of erstwhile a awesome philosopher applies a caller intelligence exemplary — essentially, a caller measurement of reasoning astir things; a heuristic for interpreting nan world. Rather than accepting earlier, much symbolic pictures of nan Earth, Ptolemy ventured to create a true-to-life representation. He shifted nan measurement of reasoning from storytelling to describing reality.

Mental models thief america to understand things much afloat and travel up pinch smarter, much innovative solutions. But arsenic Charlie Munger, erstwhile vice president of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., used to say, you person to build a "latticework" of mental models, employing various models to maximize your knowing of different situations.