8 posts tagged with "Thinking"

A decision matrix is a table with your options down the side and your criteria across the top; you score every option on every criterion, optionally weight the criteria, and compare. Its value is less the final total than the discipline: every option is judged on the same ruler, and the criterion you were quietly ignoring becomes a column you have to fill in.

The last post in Thinking models in practice, a short series on classic methods and how to run them on your own material.

Six thinking hats is a method for looking at one question from six angles, one at a time: white for facts, red for feelings and instinct, black for risks, yellow for value, green for new ideas and blue for managing the process and deciding the next move. Its point is separation — not arguing optimism against caution in the same breath.

Part of Thinking models in practice, a short series on classic methods and how to run them on your own material.

SCAMPER is a checklist of seven prompts for improving an existing idea, product or process: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse. You run the idea through each prompt in turn and write down what it suggests. It works because it forces you past the two or three moves you would make anyway.

Part of Thinking models in practice, a short series on classic methods and how to run them on your own material.

First principles thinking means breaking a problem down to the things you are confident are true — physical limits, real costs, actual requirements — and reasoning up from those, instead of starting from how the problem is usually solved. It is slow and effortful, so it is worth using only where convention may be wrong and the stakes justify the work.

Part of Thinking models in practice, a short series on classic methods and how to run them on your own material.

An AI skill is a plain-text file — usually SKILL.md — with a name and a one-line description of when it applies at the top, and the method below: the steps, the checks, the shape of the output. To write one that gets used, describe the situation it applies to rather than its contents, keep the method concrete enough to be followed literally, and fix it the first time it lets you down.

The third time you type the same instruction into a chat box — "decisions first, each with an owner and a date" — that sentence has become a skill. It just has not been saved yet.

To steelman an argument is to restate the opposing view in its strongest form — better than its own advocates might — before you respond to it. It is the opposite of a straw man. If your position still stands against the steelman, it is worth holding; if it does not, you found out cheaply.

Part of Thinking models in practice, a short series on classic methods and how to run them on your own material.

A pre-mortem is a planning exercise in which you assume the project has already failed — it is a year from now and it went badly — and list the reasons why. Because the failure is treated as a fact rather than a possibility, people name risks they would otherwise keep to themselves. It takes about twenty minutes and works best right before a decision is final.

This is the first post in a short series, Thinking models in practice: one classic method per post, what it is for, how to run it by hand, and how to run it on your own material.

An AI mind map is worth using again because the old weakness was never the diagram — it was that a blank map only holds the angles you already thought of. When each branch can apply a named thinking model to your actual material, the map stops reflecting your habits and starts widening them.

Mind mapping has been quietly out of fashion for a decade, and the usual explanation — that the tools were clunky — has never been true. The tools were fine. Something else was wrong, and it is worth naming precisely, because it turns out to be the part that changed.