Chapter 9 Mental Models

Why the best ideas fail

New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply
held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to
familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of
managing mental models surfacing, testing, and improving our internal
pictures of how the world works promises to be a major breakthrough for
building learning organisations.
None of us can carry an organisation in our minds- or a family or a
community. What we can carry in our heads are images, assumptions, and
stories. Philosophers have discussed mental models for centuries, going
back at least to Plats parable of the cave.
Our mental models determine not only how we make sense of the world,
but how we take action.
Although people do not [always] behave congruently with their espoused
theories [what they say], they do behave congruently with their theoriesin-use [their mental models]. Chris Argyris of Harvard.
Mental models can be simple generalizations such as people are
untrustworthy, or they can be complex theories, such as my assumptions
about why members of my family interact as they do. But what is most
important to grasp is that mental models are active they shape how we
act. If we believe people are untrustworthy, we act differently from the
way we would if we believed they were trustworthy.
Why are mental models so powerful in affecting what we do? In part,
because they affect what we see. Two people with different mental models
can observe the same event and describe it differently, because theyve
looked at different details and made different interpretations. As
psychologists say, we observe selectively. This is no less true for
supposedly objective observes such as scientists than for people in
general. The way mental models shape our perceptions is no less
important in management.
The problem with mental models lie not in whether they are right or wrong
by definition, all models are simplifications. The problems with mental
models arise when they become implicit when they exist below the level
of our awareness. Because we remain unaware of our mental models, the
models remain unexamined. Because they are unexamined, the models
remain unchanged. As the world changes, the gap widens between our
mental models and reality, leading to increasingly counterproductive
actions.
As some organisations have demonstrated, entire industries can develop
chronic misfits between mental models and reality. In some ways, close-

knit industries are especially vulnerable because all the member

companies look to each other for standards of best practice.
Failure to appreciate mental models has undermined many efforts to
foster systems thinking. The inertia of deeply entrenched mental models
can overwhelm even the best systematic insights. This has been a bitter
lessons for many a purveyor of ew management tools, not only for
systems thinking advocates.
But if mental models can impede learning freezing companies and
industries in outmoded practices 0 why cant they also help accelerate
learning. This simple question became, over time, the impetus for the
discipline of bringing mental models to the surface and challenging them
so they can be improved.
Working with mental models in practice
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