Leaders, Share Your Mental Models

No One Has To Unpack Your BS For You.

Julie Zhuo

wrote in her recent post:

One of our team members, Nishant, asked me a question in a 1:1 recently: “*How can I have impact?*”

Because we are working together at a for-profit company operating in a capitalist economy, our answer is the same as any other such company — grow profits in the long run.

So the truest response to How can I have impact? is this:

Do things that contribute to profit growth in the long run

Alas, it isn’t terribly useful.

Nishant is a sharp cookie, so he’ll probably immediately launch into the next volley of questions:

• What things contribute to profit growth?

• What is “the long run?

These are excellent questions! But I am now faced with a problem: whatever answers I give will no longer be guaranteed to be true.

A useful answer to “How can I have impact?” is one that is specific and actionable.

Something like “Do Task X for Project Y in Z days” fits the bill.

The problem is, how do we know doing X will actually be impactful?

She then goes to show the chain of assumptions that lead her to think that Task X for Project Y in Z days would fit the bill.

But she admits:

If any assumption is substantively wrong enough, it might be the defective link that breaks the entire chain, leading us to fail in our objective.

It’s great to see her admit all that. It’s hard to admit.

It made me think of path dependence in product.

@ibscribe

wrote about it, and so have others: NN Taleb, Ryan Singer, probably many more.

So in the end, she talks about having to inspect the assumptions we make as leaders.

We've all experienced a HiPPO-driven product decision, a sudden shift in direction based on a single anecdote, at least once in our professional careers.

We rarely see the logic behind it, spelled out, explained carefully.

Some of the poor souls on the team may choose to speak up, during town hall presentations and later in kickoffs:

“Why are we doing this? Do we really think it’s going to work?”

The leader at that point is in an uncomfortable position.

"Yes,” they respond. “And we’re not debating these decisions. We’re building Project Y. It’s going to work.”

Will Lethain recently wrote his notes on the book “How Big Things Get Done”:

This idea, termed “strategic misrepresentation” (p26), reminds me of a poor joke I sometimes tell, which is that “Vice Presidents never miss their targets, they just move the targets to what they accomplish.”

It’s preferable to not expose your mental model that produced the computation of the goal and the plan.

If the model is not clear, shifting the goal post becomes an easy task. (And the more senior you are, the better you are at navigating such conversations.)

So don’t share your mental model if you don’t want to be held accountable for its results.

Only share it if you’re ready to have skin in the game.