What The Heck Are Mental Models?
Your way of thinking brought you to where you are. If you want to move to new levels, you need new tools for better thinking.
And this is what Mental Models are.
I have a long collection of bad decisions made in my businesses, more than I can remember. Some of them had minor consequences, some were disastrous. For example, not selling my properties before the 2008 market crash, even after being warned that there was a market bubble about to burst. Or ignoring my accountant´s advice that I should have at least 6 months of fixed costs savings, and then having to fold my business for, amongst other reasons, cash flow problems due to the fluctuations of the market.
If you are in business, you know how overwhelming decision-making can be, especially when required to solve problems in areas you are not familiar with. The new information abundance may seem a blessing, but to filter the noise and find what you need can be daunting. And even with all the information in the world, you probably know how easy it is to get it wrong.
This book will show you how to use simple and effective frameworks to improve your decision-making through Mental Models. They will help you understand the problem, analyse the options, and choose the best pathway ahead.
A Mental Model is a representation of how something works. Your brain uses them to understand something, to solve problems and to make decisions.
To understand, resolve or decide, your brain relies on patterns stored in your memory. Have you ever stood in front of an abstract painting trying to see something recognizable? Right there, your mind was looking for a pattern that fitted the vast number of models you have stored in your memory for objects, people, and everything else.
In the same way, when you try to solve a problem, your mind searches through the patterns you have learned when you faced similar situations to try to apply them again. These models in your mind are what we call Mental Models. They are the bricks your mind uses to build your thinking.
The problem is that most of them were not consciously chosen by you. They were just adopted based on your experiences, and they may not be the best way to solve something now.
The idea here is to give you a starting collection of alternative Mental Models for business decisions, so you can choose from a wider range of options, and not be limited by the ones you have now. I will also show you how you can build new models and expand your collection.
Learning new Mental Models is like downloading new lines of code into your brain for an upgrade to your thinking.
They are, for sure, the best mindset hack I ever found. New models will quickly improve your ability to reframe a problem and find innovative solutions. They can increase your assurance when making decisions, and if you keep using them, they become your natural way of thinking.
This book will introduce you to some remarkably simple but powerful models. They work like power tools in your toolbox for problem-solving and decision-making.
The collection of your mental models about how everything works makes your worldview. If you change your mental models, you change your worldview and the way you decide and operate in the world.
For example, Start With The End in Mind is one of my favourites. The principle behind it is that to plan something, you should first decide what you want it to be like when ready.
So, whenever I plan my day, a meeting, or a new marketing strategy, I start with this Mental Model. I ask myself or my team: What is the result we want from it? What should it be like when ready?
In our business masterminds, I use this model to help people decide what they want from life by asking them:
“Suppose you are in your last years of life, and some children ask you about your life story. What would you like to be able to tell them?”
But most people get stuck here. They had never thought about it before. So, I decided to try a mental model called Inversion to sort it. I changed my question to:
“What is the story you DON´T want to live from now up to your last years?”
To my surprise, they all had their answers ready. Here are some of them:
“I don´t want to be poor.”
“I don´t want to be on my own.”
“When I grow old, I don´t want to be a burden to my children.”
“I don´t want to spend my last years in a hospital bed.”
“I don´t want to waste my life doing a job I hate.”
Now that they listed what they do NOT want from life, it is just a matter of inverting it again to build the desired story of their future.
All I did was to apply a new Mental Model to the problem, and it was immediately sorted.
How To Simplify Principles and Make Them Memorable
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
I am an avid reader, and one day I was checking the notes I had written a couple of years before, when reading a book. I was astonished to find there a brilliant insight that I should have acted upon but had completely forgotten.
So, I began to wonder, “what is the point of reading so much if my ability to remember and apply my learnings is so poor?”
I solved it with Mental Models. Every time I learn an important actionable principle, I create a mental model for it. I usually make a Mind Map to summarize the model, and then try to use the model straight away.
To be memorable and actionable, a Mental Model must be simple. So, I strip it of everything that is not essential before I transform it into a Mind Map. When the model is tested and proved, I start sharing it to my clients.
Non-fiction books usually have just a few core ideas. You can pick up the ones you want and summarize them with Mental Models. For example, when reading The Power of Habit, I created a 3-line Mental Model that allows me to remember and use the central idea of the book. Reading the classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I created the Start With The End in Mind Mental Model, extremely useful for any kind of planning.
And this is what a Mental Model is, in the context of this book. It is always a principle or set of principles expressed in an actionable format, that we will use to understand, decide, or troubleshoot something.
To make them easy to remember and use, I created a 3 P´s structure to my mental models, shared in the following chapter.
Purpose, Principles and Possible Questions
Every Mental Model in this post finishes with the 3 Ps – the Purpose, Principle and Possible Questions of the discussed Mental Model. This structure makes them simple and memorable.
P for PURPOSE. You don´t want to learn something if there is not a clear purpose for it – if it is not to understand, solve or decide. So, we start by stating what that model is good for.
P for PRINCIPLES. You can derive Mental Models from anything, but to be useful, they must be based on actionable principles. A principle is a fundamental truth about something. It serves as a foundation to solve problems, to understand situations and to make decisions.
P for POSSIBLE QUESTIONS. To connect the Principles to the Purpose, we use questions. Questions have the amazing power to direct our thinking. We will see more of it when we explore the 5 Whys and other models. The questions may vary according to the context where the model is used. I will suggest some for general situations, but I am sure you will find new and better ones depending on the situation at hand.
You Don´t Want To Forget It
When I discovered Mental Models, I got excited about the potential of using frameworks to think better and make better decisions. I went on to read books, articles, study, make notes, register my models, create mind maps.
And then I had a problem: I would often forget to use them when they were needed. I would start planning or troubleshooting something and halfway realize that mental models would have made it easier and quicker.
This problem was sorted when I began to create prompts. For example, I have a morning ritual when I do my brain boot for the day and plan my activities. I follow a template created for this purpose, including the Mental Models to be used in the ritual. This template works as a prompt for the use of the models.
In my mentoring sessions with clients, I have a list of mental models I usually apply with them. So, I put a reminder in my diary just before the session, to make sure they are not forgotten.
You will need prompts only when you are learning to use new Mental Models. After you use the same model many times, it becomes a habit and you don´t need to be reminded anymore.
Creating Habits for better thinking
In this post, you will learn fifteen models for business decisions. The idea is to give you a quick start to using this amazing tool, so you can carry on collecting, creating, and using different models for different purposes. You can have a list of models for planning, another to solve problems, another to deal with human behaviour, another to increase your work performance. You can create lists for anything else you want to understand, to decide or to solve.
So instead of approaching a problem with a blank mind and then trying to imagine ways to deal with it, you will have lists of principle-based frameworks to give you new ways towards the solution, a pathway to make your work easier and better.
The beauty of having a collection of Mental Models is that you can choose and apply several of them to the same problem. Each one will give you unique insights, increasing the opportunities of finding the best solution or making the best decision.
Mental Models work better when you make them a thinking habit. As you keep repeating the use of the same models, they will become your natural way of thinking. And by improving your thinking, you can transform your results in literally any area of your life.
So, let´s start downloading these lines of code into our brains straight away.
The Information Fallacy
I want you to make the best of the insights you will get here, so, before we start talking about business decisions, let me introduce you to my main model for learning anything. I call it The Information Fallacy because when you read a book or watch a video, you get the illusion that you are learning. You are not. You will soon forget most of what you read or watched.
Natural selection always favours actions. Just thinking doesn´t increase your chances of survival, so your brain is configured to remember what you do, much more than what you read or hear.
Therefore, the best way to ensure that what you read here actually improves your decision-making skills is to act immediately on that information. So, you move from reading to doing.
For example, let´s suppose you have read about my use of “Start With The End In Mind” and have decided to give it a try. You have a problem to solve, and you write down what the situation should look like when the problem is solved. That gives you clear references and targets to start working on the problem. As you think and write it, your brain is creating new connections through your actions. This is where the real learning happens. If you do it a few more times, you can then say that you know it. It is not just information anymore, but working memories stored in your cells.
Inform – Perform – Transform
To make this model easier to remember, I use this sequence of words – Inform, Perform and Transform. We have already covered the first two – You first feed your brain with the new information, as you are doing right now. Then you make use of the information, or, to put it another way, you act as a result of what you now know.
Let us suppose you liked what you got from using the Start With The End In Mind model and decided to use it frequently. For example, you will start every day by asking yourself what you would like to have achieved by the end of it.
After doing this same thing many times, that action becomes ingrained in your brain, it becomes a habit. And habits have an amazing collateral effect: They alter the way you see yourself. For example, if you drink too much too often, you may start seeing yourself as an alcoholic, and this will reinforce this behaviour. It becomes part of who you believe you are, so you are expecting yourself to act in line with it.
But the same principle works for good things. The results that you get using better frameworks for better thinking will alter your perception of who you are. You will start seeing yourself as someone who thinks better, has strategies for better reasoning, and makes better decisions. It becomes part of your identity.
I call it the TRANSFORMATION phase. You become what you repeatedly do.
I believe that the information contained in this short book can cause a revolution in your life. For it to happen, you INFORM yourself to know what to do. Then you use that information to PERFORM something and learn by putting it to good use. Finally, you repeat that action, again and again, to let the new learning TRANSFORM your results and finally who you are.
This is what Mental Models brought about in my life and in the lives of hundreds of people I serve through our programmes. And this is what I am sure they can produce in you.
The 3 Ps For THE INFORMATION FALLACY
PURPOSE
To transform information into real learning and have this learning transforming your ways of operating and your perception of yourself.
PRINCIPLES
Real learning happens when you act using the information received.
Mental models that you often use become part of who you are.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
INFORM – What is the principle I want to remember here?
PERFORM – How can I transform this information into action?
TRANSFORM – What kind of prompt can I create to remind me to use this principle?
Circle of Competence
Circle of Competence is the Mental Model that could have saved my property business IF I knew it AND used it back in 2008. The principle behind it is that you should always stay within the limits of the areas you know well. Warren Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger use this model to establish the boundaries on where they will invest their money. If you put your cash in businesses you don´t know very well, the chances of losing it are much higher.
I use this model in a wider way. When I must decide about something important, for example, a new product to launch or a partnership in a new area, I ask myself how much I know about it. Do I know it enough to decide well? How can I be sure of it? What are the numbers, the evidence that this is so?
We are all biased towards believing we know enough about something. Perhaps we heard about it many times or read a couple of books or articles about the subject. But as we learned through The Fallacy of Information Model, there is a huge gap between reading a book and having enough practical knowledge to make a good decision.
This is what happened to me and my property business. I had a few houses, bought with buy-to-let mortgages. To buy and keep them, I read articles, researched, and compared options, learned about locations, house maintenance, costs, taxes, and so I thought I knew a lot about it.
Back in 2008, I began to receive emails from The Motley Fool list, warning everyone about the imminent burst of the property market bubble. They showed the evidence – historical comparisons, indexes, graphs. They stated that property prices were about 40% above what they should be. They kept saying “Sell your house, rent a place, and it will save you money when the crash comes.”
I thought I knew better and I simply ignored it all. And I was wrong. I ended up losing 5 houses, a high price for my wrong assumptions regarding my ability to judge the situation.
I decided on something outside my zone of competence. I thought my gut feeling was enough.
When to Trust Your Gut Feelings to Make Decisions
You may have heard stories of people making decisions based on intuition and getting it right. When the stakes are high, I believe you should use this resource only in two situations:
1 – When you don´t have any other option, no data, no experts to consult, no one who knows it better and who you could ask. Or perhaps not enough time to inquire.
2 – When the decision is within your circle of competence. You did it hundreds of times before. You know every aspect of what could go wrong. You have internalised all the procedures that make it work, and you don´t have to think a lot to decide.
So, if you are dealing with something outside your circle of competence, remember your unconscious bias towards believing that you know enough, and them get help from someone who knows more than you in the relevant field.
The 3 Ps for the CIRCLE OF COMPETENCE
PURPOSE
To avoid bad decisions due to the biased perception we have about our expertise in one area.
To avoid mistakes when deciding on things outside our circle of competence.
PRINCIPLES
We all have a small circle of competence. Inside this circle, we find everything we are experts at. We don´t just know about it, we know exactly how to do it. We have vast experience and proven records in those areas.
If I must make an important decision on something outside my circle of competence, I should consult an expert to help me decide.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What evidence do I have that I am an expert in this area?
What assumptions am I making about my expertise, that I can´t prove?
Who can I consult to double-check my assumptions?
Entropy –Dealing With Chaos
Entropy is an expression that doesn´t seem to fit in a business book, but this is a universal law that affects absolutely everything, including your business. It is a kind of mother of all principles.
Entropy is the level of disorder of something, and the term comes from the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that net entropy always increases in an isolated or closed system. In other words, left unchecked, disorder increases over time.
Think of a sandcastle you build on the beach. You leave it there and soon the wind, waves or people passing by will deform it and take the sand back to its original chaotic formation. They went back to the state of higher entropy, or higher disorder.
“Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m going to fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re going to fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. … Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”
John Green, Looking for Alaska.
Fundamentally, it´s all a matter of probability. For every ordered arrangement of anything, whether molecules, relationships or businesses, there are uncountably disordered states. The grains of sand put together to shape the castle on the beach is just one among trillions of other arrangements, making the chances of losing this shape extremely high.
As everything in nature tends to go back to chaos, the only way to prevent it from happening, or to delay it, is to apply energy to maintain order. Therefore, we keep our food in fridges. We spend energy to delay the decay process, that takes the food back to chaos – a disorganised structure. We eat to provide energy to our cells, so they can maintain the structures and functions that keep us alive. If we stop eating, we die and our bodies disintegrate, they go back to a chaotic formation.
The whole earth can keep the working order of the organisms, rivers, forests, and oceans because there is a powerful source constantly pouring out energy over our planet. Remove the sun and everything on earth goes back to chaos.
The same applies to anything else. You abandon a relationship, and it ceases to exist. You leave any department of your business unattended, and it will certainly become dysfunctional. Leave a team without any leadership or follow up, and the chances of having anything useful done is extremely low. There are exceptions, of course. Self-organizing systems can be assembled with human teams, but again, their members will have to direct their energy to make it work.
Our buildings decay and lose value over time; our equipment breaks down; our stock´s validity expires; our plans get outdated; our knowledge becomes inadequate; our personnel become discouraged.
The only way to keep the desired arrangement is to direct energy to maintain the order, and absolutely everything needs directed energy to keep fulfilling its purpose. This is a fundamental principle in the universe.
Whatever is not going as expected in your business, ask yourself where and how you should apply energy to bring it back to the desired order.
The 3 Ps for ENTROPY
PURPOSE
The purpose is to understand why something is not performing as it should be and then fix it.
PRINCIPLE
Everything left unattended will go back to chaos. Directed energy is the only way to prevent or delay chaos.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What is the weak link in this process?
Where is it lacking energy and disturbing the desired order?
How can I direct energy to this system to reorganise it to the desired order?
First Principles
When I was a child, I had the horrible habit of dismantling my electronic toys. I wanted to know what it had inside, how it moved, why it blinked. I was fascinated to discover that they always had a small electric motor. Then I learned that the batteries cause it to rotate. Later, I went after books and articles to understand the basics of motors and batteries. This is First Principles thinking – to go after the fundamental origins of something.
This Mental Model became famous when Elon Musk said in an interview that this way of thinking was decisive for the success of at least two of his businesses: Tesla and Space X. For Tesla, the problem was the high cost of battery packs for their cars. For Space X, it was the price of rocket motors. Both were solved with First Principles.
For the rocket motor price problem, he asked the question: What is a rocket motor made of? He then found out that they use aluminium alloys, carbon fibre, titanium, and copper. And the cost of these materials was only about 2% of the price of a rocket motor. So, he went to the commodity market with his shopping list, hired experts on rocket building, and ended up cutting the price to launch a rocket by nearly 10x. The same reasoning was used with the battery packs for Tesla cars, making the business possible and profitable.
This is how First Principles Thinking works. You go to the roots of the problem you want to solve. You boil the processes down to their fundamental parts, and then you build up from there. It is reverse engineering at work.
Businesses First Principles
My friend Chris Sheppard, who led a 1-billion-pound a year corporation in Europe, said once to me that:
Many failing companies lose sight of their prime purpose which is to achieve happy customers by giving them what they want at the right price and quality. Many Companies and state-run organisations lose sight of this and focus on internal issues. I lived through those situations of course. End results were transformed by going back to first principles: giving customers what they want when they want. We focused on excelling at the few essentials, which helped us to become the world leader at that time.
In my work mentoring new entrepreneurs, I am increasingly finding worn-out leaders. Usually due to the flood of new information, trends, and technologies available in the new digital world. Talking to Patricia, a client, and CEO of a thriving Fintech, she said:
I am always afraid of missing out on something that maybe ‘the thing’ that will take our business to the next level. I have been reading articles, watching videos, attending seminars, lives, courses, one after the other. I am exhausted.
Chris made the point of going back to the first principles of the business. If we focus on excelling at the few essentials, instead of going after every new shiny thing, we may avoid burnout and have better chances of succeeding.
The Slow Lift Problem
This First Principles Mental Model can save you time and money in different ways. Let´s consider the problem of the slow elevator, proposed by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg in his book What´s Your Problem?
You are the owner of an office building, and your tenants are complaining about the waiting time for the lift. They say that the lift is old and slow, and they have to wait for too long.
If you look at this problem using the usual thinking, you will try to find ways to make the lift go faster. For example, upgrading the motor, improving the controlling software, or something more expensive, like installing a new lift.
Or you can use a different Mental Model to solve the problem, like First Principles.
One way to look for the real root of the problem is simply to ask questions like:
What problem am I trying to solve?
How did it start?
You will remember that some people brought you this problem. So, the starting point here is not the speed of the lift, but people´s perception of the waiting time. This is the root problem you need to address.
The first question you want to ask now is not how to make the lift go faster, but how to change people´s perception of the waiting time. One proven way to change it is to install a mirror next to the lift. People usually lose track of time when looking at something that fascinates them, and we are usually fascinated with ourselves.
You can also play music or install a hand sanitizer. They can both help to change the perception of time and solve the root problem.
See that when people brought you their complaint, they stated it using their mental model, their frame of reference to the problem. First Principles enables you to use a different frame, find the real root of it, and discover new solutions.
The 3 Ps for FIRST PRINCIPLES
PURPOSE
To find and understand the roots of a problem or situation.
PRINCIPLE
Every problem has one or more roots usually hidden from the first sight. Our minds tend to satisfy with the first answers to a problem, but they hardly address its root. The problems you don´t solve by dealing with its roots usually come back to you.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What are the most fundamental parts of it?
What is it made of?
What are the physical principles involved here?
What else? Is it really the root of it?
The Five Whys
This Mental Model is a simple and powerful tool to support informed decision-making. It was created in the 1930s by Mr Sakichi Toyoda, founder of the carmaker Toyota. It is a way to delve deeper into any problem or situation.
The Five Whys can also be a way to discover the First Principles of something, the Mental Model we saw in the chapter before.
Daily problems very often have several layers of complexity. For example, lack of money is never a problem on its own. The first layer is usually bad money management, which can be caused by weak procedures or systems, which can happen when you don´t have qualified people to apply them, which is usually the result of bad recruiting practices, and so on.
These multi-layered problems are a challenge to our minds. Our brain likes what is simple and easy, so we tend to be happy with the first reasonable explanation of something, what very seldom is the root cause of it.
The Five Whys Model offers a simple and effective structure to help us overcome it. All you must do is not stop at the first explanation to the problem and keep investigating it by asking why until you find its real root. A bit like what young children do when they are creating their models of how things work.
This is how the Five Whys is described by Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System:
“The basis of Toyota’s scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. “
Here is an example of applying the Five Whys in a common business problem:
*source: kanbanize.com
Problem – We did not send the newsletter for the latest software updates on time.
- Why didn’t we send the newsletter on time?
Updates were not implemented until the deadline. - Why were the updates not implemented on time?
Because the developers were still working on the new features. - Why were the developers still working on the new features?
One of the new developers didn’t know the procedures. - Why was the new developer unfamiliar with all procedures?
He was not trained properly. - Why was he not trained properly?
Because the CTO believes that new employees don’t need thorough training and they should learn while working.
See that they could have done something easier, like sending an email with a rebuke, threatening to cut their bonuses if it happens again. Or something costly like increase the team. But using the 5 Whys they were able to find the real problem and address it more effectively.
A couple of things to consider when using the 5 whys:
- The number of whys doesn´t have to be five. The root cause may surface before or after the 5th
- You may have more than one root cause. In these cases, the 5 Whys analysis will look more like a matrix with different branches, with each branch representing a different root cause.
The 3 Ps for the FIVE WHYS
PURPOSE
To find the root of a problem or situation.
PRINCIPLE
The mind usually satisfies with the first reasonable answer. To keep asking why will take you to the root of the problem.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
Why is this problem happening?
And why is it?
And so on…
Second-Order Thinking
When we make decisions, we are typically happy to solve the immediate problem at hand. But very often, our solution will create consequences beyond what we intended, sometimes causing worse problems than the original one. Good decision-making will consider not just the first line of consequences, but also the second and third ones.
For example, there is a thesis that the USA trained the al-Qaeda to fight the Soviet deployment into Afghanistan. If this is true, the first line of intended consequence was to prevent the Soviets from taking the country and expanding their power in the area. But al-Qaeda, led by Osama Bin Laden, ended up using what they learned against the USA, leading to a series of terrorist acts, including the infamous 7/11 attack in American Soil. This would be the second line of consequence from the decision to train al-Qaeda.
If your company is going through cash flow problems, the first thought is usually to reduce expenses, very often firing people. The first line of consequences is the desired cost reduction. However, the second line of consequences could include the time and money spent later to hire and train the ones who have left.
You can also have a third line of consequences. After some time lacking proper human resources to operate, your business may lose market share and start having cash flow problems again, taking you back to square one.
Think Through Time
When evaluating possible options to decide, try to think through time. Second and third-order consequences usually come later, so explore the possible outcomes after a few months or years.
Most important things in life will have negative first-line consequences, but extremely positive second- and third-line ones. For example, exercises bring immediate discomfort, but the second and third lines can be health and longevity.
This Mental Model is basic strategic thinking. It will make your decisions more laborious and time-consuming, but if you are deciding something important, it can be well worth the effort.
The 3 Ps for SECOND-ORDER THINKING
PURPOSE
To think strategically, to avoid short-sightedness when deciding.
PRINCIPLE
Decisions always produce a chain of consequences. Good decision-making considers beyond the first line of outcomes.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What will be the consequence of the consequence?
What other outcomes we may have?
What will be the repercussion like in 10 months? What about 10 years?
Start With The End in Mind
I´ve already mentioned and given you a couple of examples about this mental model but let´s go a bit deeper and see a few more uses of this amazing planning tool.
This model is based on the principle that everything is created twice. First in someone´s mind, and then in the visible world.
One of Michelangelo’s most famous quote is:
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
He was referring to how he sculpted “The Angel”. Michelangelo saw the final product before he started creating it. This is how this Mental Model works.
Some ways you can use it:
Giving Feedback
When having one of those hard talks with your partner, colleague, or employee, you can prepare for it by asking what you want out of that conversation. To decide the desired outcomes before you start will allow you to choose the way you will conduct the talk.
For example, you want to talk to someone about his poor performance. Starting with the end in mind, you decide that the desired outcomes are:
- He will understand why he scored low
- I will learn what is happening with him
- He agrees to be retrained or to go through our coaching programme.
When you set clear desired outcomes, you can now lead the conversation without being side-tracked by other issues and making sure you are progressing towards your goals.
Planning Meetings
You probably know that meetings are one of the top time wasters in companies. And it is usually due to lack of planning. If you plan it starting with the end in mind, you will ask, “what outcomes do I want from this meeting?” Your answer may have items like:
- Report results and evaluate the last marketing campaign.
- A final decision regarding proposal X.
- Decide about the renewing with contractor Y.
If you want to fine-tune this list, you can apply Inversion by asking what you DON´T want from the meeting. Some ideas:
- I don´t want the meeting lasting longer than planned.
- I don´t want people speaking longer than necessary.
- I don´t want the meeting finishing without a list of decisions made, tasks assigned, who is responsible and the due date for each task.
Now, with both lists, you can decide what you will do to reach the desired outcomes and avoid the ones you don´t want.
Plan Your Week/Day
Whichever method you use for strategic planning, it must somehow be translated into weekly and daily activities. I plan my week usually on Monday mornings, and I start by getting my goals for the quarter and asking: If today were Friday, what would I like to have achieved? And the list becomes my plan for the week.
I do the same with my daily planning. I pick items from my targets for the week and block the times on my diary for the ones I decide to do on that day.
Any Kind of Planning
In our planning workshops, we encourage people to build a master plan for their lives. We sometimes use the picture of the person´s funeral to remember that our lives eventually come to an end, but we can decide what kind of story we want to live from now up to that moment. This is a radical kind of Start With The End In Mind use.
I teach organisations to use a methodology called OKRs – Objectives and Key Results – for strategic and tactical planning. We always start with the objectives to be achieved in a given period. Again, this is to start with the end in mind.
Without a clear picture of what you want, where you want to arrive, what is the desired outcome of any plan, you will unnecessarily wander and waste your time and energy.
The 3 Ps for START WITH THE END IN MIND
PURPOSE
To plan anything in life and business.
PRINCIPLE
Any plan requires a vision of what the desired result is.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What outcomes do I want from this?
What should it look like when ready?
How will I know that this problem is sorted?
Inversion
I mentioned before how I use inversion to help my mentees envision the stories of their lives and create a life plan. This Mental Model is a crucial thinking skill that we all should learn early in life. It can make problem-solving and decision-making easier, faster, and better.
To use inversion, you consider the opposite of what you want or the opposite of the question you are asking. This is how this model was applied by Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus, who believed that to consider how to manage failure is as important as to pursue success.
The German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob became famous for solving hard problems using a strategy he described as “invert, always invert.” He found out that one of the best ways to solve problems is to reinstate them in inverse form.
Jeff Bezos used this model to develop Amazon´s strategy. He says that while everyone was trying to guess what was going to change in the market, he decided to focus on what was not going to change. In his own words:
I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I rarely get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.
It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher.” “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.” Impossible.
And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett´s partner, is a big user of this model. He says that most people are focusing on being successful, but they should focus on what they want to avoid, like sloth and unreliability. To avoid stupidity is easier and it should be a priority for anyone looking to be successful.
Another example: trying to find ways to improve your finances, you may ask, “how can I make more money?”. But many times, the inverted question will give you easier and more actionable answers. If you ask, “How can I lose less money?” you can probably find quick ways to cut on unnecessary expenses and end up with more money.
Whenever I plan anything, I start with the end in mind, and then I apply inversion. After I decide what is the result I want, I invert my question:
“What are the results I don´t want from this?”
This second list usually gives me insights I would otherwise not have. It´s interesting how the answers for the inverted question usually come easier. Our survival configured minds are probably better trained to detect and avoid problems than to find solutions.
Another example: Let´s suppose your sales team targets were not met. Instead of asking “What are we doing wrong?”, you can ask “What are we doing right?” You may have a couple of people selling well above the average in your team. You could ask them to share their methods with everyone else.
When creating a project, instead of just asking “What could make this project a success?”, you can also ask “What could make this project fail?” And then take the measures to prevent it from happening.
Although inversion is counterintuitive, it is a key thinking tool of great thinkers. We don´t like spending time thinking about the opposite of what we want. But good strategies always consider the possibility of failure.
We love success stories and usually forget that the extremely successful people we admire certainly failed more than we can imagine. They failed, and we will certainly fail many more times in our way to achieving what we want. Inversion can help us minimize failure and be better prepared when it happens.
The 3 Ps for INVERSION
PURPOSE
To solve a problem or make a decision.
To investigate further outcomes when troubleshooting or deciding.
PRINCIPLE
To invert the problem or the question very often makes it easier to solve or answer and brings new perspectives to it.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What is the opposite of it?
How could it go wrong?
What can make it not work?
Intentional Pauses
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for creating a model for our thinking systems. He used a two-systems model, with System 1 being fast, unconscious, and spending little energy. System 2 is conscious, slow, and power-hungry. System 2 also enables us to ponder, reason, and evaluate options when deciding.
When you are solving new problems, comparing the positive and negative aspects of a decision, trying to imagine the first, second and third-order consequences, you are using System 2. It needs data, frameworks, structures, and methods.
But as System 2 is power-hungry, it can easily deplete your brain resources of neurotransmitters. You feel your brain hurting after working hard on a problem for long hours.
When it happens, slow down to go faster. Stop trying to solve the problem and do something that does not require reasoning. It can be tiding up, going for a walk, or just sit and relax. Many people have aha moments when having a shower. Suddenly, the answer you were looking for is downloaded from somewhere. It just appears in your conscious mind.
When you do something relaxing, you allow System 1 to take over. It will work in the background to solve the problem. We don´t know yet exactly how it works inside our heads, but we know that it does.
This handover between the systems usually works better when:
- You have a strong desire to know the answer or solve the problem.
- You spent enough time trying to solve it.
- You gave your brain all the data it needs. The options, the lines of consequences, the numbers, and all the necessary considerations.
The 3 Ps for INTENTIONAL PAUSES
PURPOSE
To solve a new and difficult problem, or to make a hard decision.
PRINCIPLE
Our two thinking systems have different strengths. You can solve hard problems better when you create the conditions for a handover from System 2 to System 1. You do it by stopping trying to solve the problem and engaging with something that doesn´t require reasoning.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
Am I stuck?
Do I have enough data?
What else should I know?
Thinking on Paper
When thinking about something, very clever people can handle up to seven variables at the same time in the working memory of their minds. For most of us, this number is lower – between three and four. This was enough during the 200k years we lived in the jungle, and our problems were mostly related to survival and reproduction. But we now live complex lives with complex problems, and it is common to have much more than three variables or options to consider when deciding something.
The simplest way to overcome this hurdle is to use the old pen and paper to help you think. You can write down all the options and considerations you want. It works as an extension of your brain.
When reasoning about something, I use a large flipchart sheet and a set of sharpies of different colours. Then I write sentences, questions, draw diagrams, journeys, and sketches. Perhaps I will never touch that sheet again, but the exercise of expressing my thinking on paper is a powerful way to improve my thinking processes.
From all kinds of diagrams, Mind Maps are by far my favourites. They were created by a British guy called Tony Buzan and are used all over the world today. To make decisions, I usually write whatever is to be decided in the middle of a blank page, and then I draw branches with the options I have. The next step is to draw another level of branches out of the first ones, with considerations about each option.
The 3 Ps for THINKING ON PAPER
PURPOSE
To solve a problem or decide when many variables or options are involved.
PRINCIPLES
The mind can deal with only a few variables in its working memory. You can remove this constraint by writing, drawing, and sketching on paper.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
How can I express this problem using phrases, diagrams or sketches?
What is exactly the problem I am trying to solve, or the decision I must make?
What are the variables involved?
Questions Storms
This Mental Model will save you time and trouble. It is a bit like brainstorms, but instead of jotting down ideas, you write the questions you should answer to solve the problem or make the decision.
Questions have the power to direct our thinking. If you want to know the answer to something, ask yourself good questions, and even when you are not consciously thinking about it, your brain will be quietly working trying to give you the answers.
Good answers come from good questions. So instead of just jumping into the decision or problem you want to solve, you start by asking this central question:
What questions should I have to answer to make a good decision here? (or to solve this problem?)
For example, let´s suppose you are trying to solve a cash flow problem. Your first step should be to build your questions storm with questions like:
How long can my business survive without sorting it?
What are my options?
What are the ups and downs of each one?
Which one is the cheapest?
Which one is the quickest?
What would be the collateral damages of each option?
What would be the second and third lines of consequences?
What else could I do?
Important: Don´t try to answer the questions as you write them. Write down all of them first, and then start to answer. Otherwise, you will be tempted to stop halfway if you think you had an insight. You may get engaged with your great idea and leave important questions without being asked, leading to sub-optimal solutions.
The 3 Ps for QUESTIONS STORM
PURPOSE
To start planning something, solve a big problem, make an important decision.
PRINCIPLES
Before you start answering questions, you should decide what questions are important to answer.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What questions should I have to answer to make a good decision here?
What questions should I have to answer to solve this problem?
Pareto
This is a well-known Mental Model, and I was tempted to assume that everyone knows it. But even if this is not new for you, it is worth the repetition for its wide range of application.
Pareto was an accountant in Italy who discovered that roughly 20% of the causes are responsible for 80% of the effects.
These numbers don´t have to be precise. The key idea is that in most cases cause and effect are not linear: a small subset of causes usually produces most of the effects.
Some examples:
- 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers
- 20% of your expenses produce 80% of the total spent
- 20% of the population has 80% of the wealth in a country
The business applications of this principle are countless:
- For cost reduction, work on your top 20% expenses instead of doing an item-by-item analysis.
- For cause and effect analysis, focus on the top 20% of the causes.
- To increase sales, create promotions focusing on your best customers.
- To increase margins, focus on your products with higher mark-ups.
- To segment your market, create campaigns directed to serve the needs of specific niches.
The 3 Ps for PARETO
PURPOSE
To optimise troubleshooting or decision-making.
PRINCIPLES
20% of the causes are responsible for 80% of the effects.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What are the top 20% of the causes?
What is responsible for 80% of the effects?
Minimalist Decision-Making
This is a deceptively simple Mental Model to be used when you want to decide between doing or not doing something. I learned it through a friend of mine, who was the president of a large corporation in Europe. This is the way he decides on important matters. Then I read a post on Richard Branson´s blog, showing how he uses the same process for decision-making.
This is what they do: they get a piece of paper and draw a line in the middle, creating two columns. On the left, they list the downsides of deciding for it. On the right, the upsides. And then they decide to compare both lists, checking if it is worth going through the downsides to getting the upsides.
Why do they write the ups and downs? Can´t they just think of them? Remember the “Thinking on Paper” Mental Model. Your mind can´t handle many variables at the same time, so writing them down will release some headspace for your reasoning.
I also call this model Binary Decisions, for its do-not do nature.
The 3 Ps for BINARY DECISIONS
PURPOSE
To decide between doing or not doing something.
PRINCIPLES
Our minds work better with simple, binary decisions. To register the upsides and downsides of doing or not doing something creates a simple way to compare both and decide what to do.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
Can I reduce this matter to a binary decision (do/not do)?
What could be bad if I decide to do it?
What could be good if I decide to do it?
Is it worth paying the price of the downsides to have the upsides?
The 200K-YEAR-Old Mind
This mental model will help you understand the fundamentals of human nature and behaviour. The isolated facts and principles I will mention here are not new, but the connection between them and the logic that follows is the result of applying the First Principles model to concepts of Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology and Neuroscience.
To understand the basics of human behaviour, we should consider some essential facts:
First, our brain exists to increase our chances of survival and reproduction. We like to believe that our brain controls everything. It is a fact that the brain controls many bodily functions, but most of what it does is towards serving the needs of the body and maintaining homeostasis, the equilibrium state of the functions that keep us alive.
So, in many ways, the brain is more of a servant than a master of the body. This fact has many important implications for our behaviour. Let´s explore it further.
The earliest known human ancestor lived 200 thousand years ago in Africa. For nearly all this time, we lived in the jungle, with food scarcity and surrounded by all sorts of threats to our lives.
Our brains evolved to increase the chances of our survival and reproduction in this very hostile environment. This is especially relevant, since the brain is the interface between the body and your surroundings, and to help the body survive, the brain configures itself according to the environment.
We then discovered that living in tribes offered many advantages regarding survival and reproduction. Tribal or social behaviour grew out of this new arrangement, bringing a new layer of complexity to how we operate.
I will say it again: for nearly 200 thousand years, the jungle and the tribe were our primary environments. You cannot understand why we do what we do without taking it into account.
Fear kept us alive both in the jungle and in the tribe. To be rejected and excluded by your tribe meant starving to death or becoming the next meal of beasts or other tribes. It also meant no chances of reproduction.
In the last couple of centuries, we moved from the jungle to the cities. Not many people starve to death anymore, when compared to the past, and we don´t have beasts or enemy tribes threatening our lives. Most importantly, we don´t need a tribe to survive. If my tribe does not like me, this will not kill me, and I have plenty of options to join a new one.
However, this is all very new when compared to the time we spent in the wild. Our biology still follows the rules of the jungle and the tribe. Our bodies still believe that we must ingest all possible calories to survive, that exercise makes sense only to bring in more calories, like by hunting. To this old configuration, to step on a treadmill and run is a waste of vital calories, a kind of suicidal act.
And we are still terrified of the possibility of being socially rejected as if it could kill us. Because in the past, it did.
So, our main behavioural challenge is that our brain configuration is outdated. Our environment changed too quickly, and evolution did not have enough time to produce all the necessary adjustments.
This dealignment between our old configuration and the new environment creates all sorts of emotional unbalances, strange behaviours, and weird reactions we all have. They infect our personal and professional lives. You will find them inside your house, your office and inside yourself.
For example, if you ever wondered why we buy cars we can´t afford just to have more status, just remember that in the tribe, status gave us higher survival and reproduction chances. The chief of the tribe and his family ate better, were protected and had more sexual partners. Ok, you can still have more sexual partners if you drive a nice car, but this is all part of a configuration that does not make much sense anymore.
Our longing for appreciation and acceptance by other people were vital in tribal times, as explained. Not anymore. But we are still obsessed with what people think of us, how many likes our posts got, how many social networks friends we have.
If you want to be a good leader, manage yourself and your people well, attract and keep talents, you can´t ignore this old brain configuration we all have. Just a few examples to follow:
- The political struggles you have in your organisation are tribal behaviours of people striving for status and power, deep inside believing that they may die without these things.
- What we call laziness, is usually just the outcome of a body that doesn´t want to waste energy. It still believes that calories are scarce and should be saved at any cost.
- If you fail to create opportunities for good social interactions among your people, you run the risk of losing them, again because of our tribal needs.
In summary, you can be a better leader, create a more productive environment and help your folks to grow and thrive, if you consider our old jungle configuration.
The Two-Layered Model
After this long introduction to the subject, I will give you now a simple Mental Model to help you make sense of a complex matter – our behaviour. Like any model, this one is not perfect or complete. But it serves us well to understand why we do what we do. This is how it works:
Imagine that we have two forces inside us. The first one comes from our cells to our brains. It is the one we just described above, meant to keep us alive. This force has 2 main drives: survival and reproduction. These drives produce a wide range of behaviours like eating, fighting, fighting, and having sex. As discussed, this force took us to live in tribes, creating another layer of manners we call tribal behaviours.
If you consider Maslow´s hierarchy of needs, this first force will include all the bottom and middle layers of his model: Physiological, Safety, Social belonging, and Self-esteem.
In our model, they are all summarized by three interrelated drives: Survival, Reproduction and Association.
The second force is called Purpose, and we will consider that purpose flows from our minds to our cells, so it goes the opposite way of the first.
When someone decides to hunger-strike, it does so moved by a sense of purpose. In this case, the purpose is overcoming the drives of the first force, the one that moves from cells to the mind. Your biology is telling you to eat, but your sense of purpose decides otherwise.
The same happens when you decide not to have dessert. Or when you go to the gym. And, when you refuse to buy a car you can´t afford.
Purpose takes you from serving your body wants to attend to your soul wishes. From immediate gratification mode to long term benefits mode.
Human behaviour is the result of these two opposing forces inside of you. They have been represented by the devil and the angel, yin and yang, flesh and spirit. Some of these metaphors portray your biology as bad and your purpose as good, which is ironic since there is no purpose if there isn´t a body.
You see these opposing drives working in your life all the time. When you try to stick to a diet. When you procrastinate. When you feel offended. When you meditate. When you gossip.
The art of understanding and dealing with human behaviour can be hugely simplified if you go to its first principles, and this is what this model is about.
Back to Business
All business problems are somehow caused by or related to human behaviour.
You create marketing campaigns to alter clients´ behaviour. You devise sales funnels to direct the actions of your audience. You manage your teams to create specific behaviours and produce the results you want.
Therefore, to be able to understand the basics of our behaviour is a necessary skill to make better decisions and succeed in life and business.
Purpose Wins
When your people believe that the sole purpose of your business is to make you rich, they will resent you, often feel abused, their biology will prevail, leading them to do as little as possible, as far as they are not caught.
However, if your business exists to contribute not only to your pockets, you have better chances to increase productivity, and attract and keep good and talented people. Think of companies making great social contributions, fighting for sustainable practices, adopting ethical policies. Their employees often don´t see their work only as a way to pay the bills, but as an opportunity to contribute to a cause they believe, to be part of a movement. This is purpose at work.
Your clients are also influenced by your perceived purpose. People choose to do business with companies that have values aligned with theirs.
The main point here: Purpose can overcome our outdated brain configuration. Give someone a strong enough purpose, and they will overrule all their instincts.
Purpose is communicated through meanings, and this is the next Mental Model we will learn.
The 3 Ps for THE 200K-YEAR-OLD MIND
PURPOSE
To understand the basics of human behaviour.
PRINCIPLES
We have an outdated brain configuration and we behave as if we were still in the jungle.
Our behaviour has two main drives – one works towards survival, reproduction and tribal life, and the other is purpose. They are often opposing forces inside us.
If strong enough, purpose wins.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
How are the two main forces working in me? In the people around me?
How can we use survival, reproduction, and tribal behaviours to reach our goals in this situation?
How can I emphasize purpose to overcome undesired instinctive behaviours and reach our goals here?
Meanings
This Mental Model works together with the one we just saw, The 200K Years Old Mind. It has the same purpose, but here we will go beyond understanding human behaviour. We will learn how it can be changed.
The beauty of Mental Models is that you can encapsulate principles from several lines of research and concepts from different areas of knowledge into one single framework. It is the case of this one. We are gathering here concepts from Neuroscience and Psychology combined into one powerful and practical model.
Here it is. Human behaviour can be modelled by the sequence:
Events happen to us (you shout at me), we give them meanings (“he is disrespecting me”), it creates emotions (anger), the emotions produce actions (I shout back to you) and the actions generate results (the relationship is damaged).
Or,
Events happen to us (you solved a problem I couldn´t), we give them meanings (“I am not clever enough”), it creates emotions (shame), the emotions produce actions (“I will pretend I knew it”) and the actions generate results (I miss an opportunity to investigate and learn).
This is a pattern your brain uses to decide what to do, and it happens dozens of times on any given day. Most of the time you don´t notice that this is happening, but this sequence from events to actions is hard-wired in your brain, this is your natural way of being you.
This pattern kept us alive as a species all those years in the jungle. Think of situations like:
You see the bush moving (event), you think it could be a tiger (meaning), you are now afraid (emotions), you run (action) and save your life (result).
We usually want to change our results. More money, fewer problems, better health, great relationships. We then try to change our actions. I will spend less, I will save and invest my money, I will exercise, I will be more patient.
If we are motivated enough, we stick to our decisions for some days, and then we usually go back to the old behaviours. Think of New Year resolutions.
To decide to change your actions and then hoping that your self-control will be enough to keep you doing it, usually doesn´t work. Because actions come from emotions. So, let´s change the emotions, right? But then we have a problem. Emotions happen outside your control. If I tell you “don´t be mad at me, but…” or “don´t be sad.” Does it work? You know it doesn´t. You cannot control your feelings. They just happen and then you notice that they are there.
But you can change the meanings. You automatically assign meanings to every event, but you can DECIDE to consciously give a more helpful meaning to something. A different meaning will produce a different emotion, a different action, and different results.
You learned to assign specific meanings to specific events mostly through your childhood. Traumatic events have the power to imprint strong meanings that can influence your actions for the rest of your life.
In my first job, I discovered that I had a problem with money. Every time I was paid, I had the urge to spend the money as soon as possible. I felt extremely uncomfortable if I had a positive balance in the bank. I could not understand or change it. Until I read a book about financial mindsets and decided to dig into my childhood for clues.
When I was 10 years old, my dad made a bad decision that took us to big financial problems. My mum warned him, but he did it anyway. Then we had not just money problems, but a marriage problem too. I still remember the debt collector coming to our house to list our belongings and take what he could, and the trouble it brought to my parents’ relationship.
Thinking of this event, I concluded that I must have assigned a bad meaning to money. Children see their parents as perfect, so I could not blame my dad. Therefore, I probably decided to blame money. Money means trouble. And if money means trouble, I must get rid of it when it comes to me.
Of course, I never created these phrases in my mind. This was all happening quietly in the background, in my unconscious mechanisms of meaning. But the effects of this meaning would one day appear and cause havoc in my life.
How do we change it? By changing our memories of the event. Going back there, living it again in your imagination, but now giving it a more useful meaning to what happened.
You do it again and again, and that becomes your new reality, your new meaning.
It took me ages to understand and sort it, but now I love having money in the bank. I am now careful in the way I handle my finances. I have savings and thresholds to control my financial reserves. But I had to deal first with my bad past meanings for money.
Note: Don´t deal with traumatic events from your past on your own. You can open a can of worms and then discover that you don´t know how to handle it. Look for a professional who can guide you safely through the process.
You cannot always control your actions. You can never control your feelings. But you can control your meanings, and meanings control everything else.
This is useful not only to deal with your distant past. You can choose better meanings for nearly everything in your life.
For example, instead of believing that something bad is happening TO YOU, you can choose a better meaning: this is happening FOR YOU. Somehow you will use it to your advantage.
What other people do to you is out of your control zone. But the meaning you give to it is under your control. For example, if you feel offended, this can poison your thinking and your actions. Decide for a better meaning, one aligned to your goals in life. For example, “This is their problem, their way of communicating something, not mine. I won´t let it poison me.”
This is one of the few things you can control in life – the meanings you assign to events. Be careful to choose well.
If you want to read a wonderful book on this subject, I strongly recommend “Man´s Search for Meaning”, by Victor E. Frankl.
The 3 Ps of MEANINGS
PURPOSE
To understand and change human behaviour.
PRINCIPLES
We give meanings to events. Meanings produce emotions. Emotions create actions. Actions produce results.
The most effective way to change results is to change the meanings given to events.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
What results do I want to change?
What are the actions producing them?
What are the emotions involved?
What meanings am I probably giving to the event, that are producing these emotions?
What meanings could be more helpful to the results I want to achieve in this kind of event?
When the Magic Happens
You will get many benefits by just using the mental models we learned here. But they become TRANSFORMATIVE when you follow some simple guidelines:
First, make them a thinking habit. As I said before, my greatest challenge was not to understand mental models, but to remember to use them. And habits are created by repetition linked to emotional rewards, so you need prompts to remind you that they are there waiting to make our life easier. Then after repeating it and enjoying its benefits for some time, they become second nature to you.
Second, start combining Mental Models. This is when their real power comes out. Charlie Munger says that he uses a Latticework of Mental Models for his investment decisions. I often use Inversion just after Start With The End In Mind, then Second-Order Thinking followed by a couple of other models. When combined, they produce an exponential effect, increasing your understanding, and expanding your options.
Third, start creating your own Mental Models. For any actionable principle you want to adopt in your life or business, just list the 3 Ps as I did here, or create a mind map. Give it a name and set up prompts to help you remember to use it.
If you want to drop me a line to ask something or let me know how you are doing with Mental Models, this is my email address and phone/WhatsApp number:
marcos (at) marcosbarros.co.uk
+44 (0)770 4433 836
I wish you well.
Marcos Barros.
About Marcos Barros
Marcos is a published author, businesses mentor, entrepreneur, co-founder and board advisor to several organisations, with clients in several countries.
He led the largest OKR implementation in a third sector organisation and the largest OKR implementation in a Public Sector organisation in Latin America.
He also developed a methodology for OKR creation using Mental Models.
Marcos has over ten years of experience working with large corporations in Europe and over 20 years experience in South America, providing training and consulting services, having trained specialised workforces in 9 different countries for companies such as AT&T, GSK, Microsoft, BSKYB (The British branch of SKY television) and Easynet.
LinkedIn: marcosbarros
+44 (0)770 4433 836
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