Using models to understand the world and make decisions is a good idea. It’s a method used by brilliant decisionmakers around the world. Charlie Mungeris a big supporter of it, and he takes the idea one step further by saying thatone needs a latticework of mental models to string data across when making adecision. This gets to the heart oftoday’s mental model, which is “The Map is Not the Territory.” My interpretation of this is that the thingyou are abstracting is not the abstraction. When we abstract or make a model, we remove a part of the reality to fitinto the model. The map of the territory is not the map. In our case, these abstractions aregenerally mental models. If you’re using just one model, and it’s a bad abstraction or just the wrong abstraction to use for that decision, you’re going to suffer. Using multiple mental model models filters the data better and resultsin better decisions. When one model disagrees with another, that’s evenbetter. So when you’re making your nextdecision, think about how the model you’re using to make that model isdifferent from the reality. What does itcapture well? What does it miss? Is there a better model to make this decisionwith, or a better combination of models?
I hope you find this useful. And if you do, here’s more information on this model.