I really resented my friend. She would ask me to do things with her—fun things, yes, but didn’t she know that I had a job? She asked for small favors, as if I could just drop everything. Even though I loved spending time with her and really wanted to be helpful, I ended up feeling resentful as I smiled and said yes when I really wanted to say no.
Then one day, as we were working on a project together, she offered to ask a mutual friend to help us. “I’ll call her,” she shrugged. “She can always say no.” Our friend did decline to help and . . . nothing happened. My friend couldn’t have cared less.
I realized that my friend was not creating my resentment. My mental model was.
I had a mental model – a deeply held assumption about how the world works (or should work) – that said, “If someone asks for something from you, you should give it to them. A good friend is always accommodating.” So when my friend asked, I felt backed into a corner with no options but one.
However, my friend’s mental model went something like, “It never hurts to ask. The other person is a grown-up and they can always say no. No harm, no foul.”
Our mental models create our feelings, our decisions and our lives . . . and often, we don’t even know what they are.
As leaders, we are constantly bumping up against the mental models of our teammates, our clients and our stakeholders . . . and again, we usually don’t even know what they are.
Learning to surface, test and improve mental models is essential to leadership.
If you’re working on a project with a team of five people, chances are good that you have at least five mental models about success around the table. That doesn’t even account for all the mental models about teamwork and communication and conflict and creativity.
Much of what we label as interpersonal conflict can be explained by a clash of mental models. What we call resistance to change is usually ambivalence about giving up our familiar assumptions.
According to Peter Senge**, the problem with our mental models is not so much whether they are right or wrong (most mental models are neither) but whether we can see them and adapt them to new information or goals.
We learn to surface our mental models by learning to think about our thinking, to notice not only what we think but how we think.
One way to do this is by recording the difference between what we are thinking and what we actually say. Putting words to what we are thinking might give us insight into what we really believe (our mental models) – and what we really believe is probably shaping our lives more than what we actually say.
Another way is to listen to those who see things differently than we do and to wonder what assumptions they hold that we don’t. We can even ask curious questions in order to hear their reasoning and compare it to our own. We can notice when our differences in opinion are not based on different data but on different mental models.
We can also learn to hold our mental models with humility. Mental models are, by definition, generalizations. Even when they are not wrong, they are usually incomplete. When we can see our mental models, we can test them to see when they hold up and when they don’t.
We made our mental models and we can un-make them. They formed as a result of our unique experiences in the world, as a way of helping us understand the world so that we could act effectively. As we gain new experiences, we can expand our mental models rather than just running our new experiences through the old assumptions.
If we want real and lasting change – personally or organizationally – there is no other way.
**Much of what has been written about mental models began with thought leader Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, specifically chapter 9.
