The thing about Mental Models is once you learn about them and you start to use them, you start seeing those patterns repeat over and over again. Its actually funny to sit back and watch and say to yourself : “I have seen this movie before and I know how it is likely to end“.

Take Convenience for example. People are likely to do what is convenient. Period. You can give any reasons you like, but people are likely to go with convenience. For example: if you keep a Coke dispenser at the office pantry, more Coke is likely to get consumed even though “everybody knows sugar is bad, blah, blah…“. It’s easier to not buy junk than to have it in your home and then having to use your willpower to stop yourself from consuming it. You and I are likely to go with convenient rather than correct. Therefore you and I should make it convenient to eat healthy food and inconvenient to eat junk.

Take Deprival Super reaction as another example. If people have to give up their benefits, then they are likely to super react to the situation. For example, there was a major uproar in France when the driving speeds were reduced from 100 Km/ hr to 90 Km/hr. Likewise, when Egypt all of a sudden nationalized the Suez Canal, the erstwhile owners (England, Israel and France) attacked Egypt.

Now, let me narrate another incident involving the above 2 mental models. A few years ago, I was working with an employer with a vast campus. To understand the anecdote better, see the map below.

As you can see, it was a couple of kilometres walk from the parking lot (C) to the main building (A). When the new building B was commissioned with its own parking lot, what do you think happened? People from A started parking their cars in the new building’s parking lot as the walk was much shorter. We all know walking is good for us yet we don’t do enough of it. Convenience of parking close by trumps any rational reason for walking.

Then, what do you think happened? Once B got fully occupied, people in B, started complaining that they were not having enough parking spaces in their own building. This is Deprival super reaction. The thinking among employees at B was “they are taking away our parking spaces and we have to stop them“. Never mind that till a few months ago, even those B employees were part of A. But now, it was us and them. Or more like us vs them.

So now, as a result, a new and more complicated system had to be devised which allowed only cars belonging to employees working in B to park in B. LOL!

Like I said, if you start to use the mental models, you are likely to see the patterns play out again and again. And here is another reason why you should use mental models – to avoid costly errors. People that don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat them. See this blog by my friend that contains so many avoidable mistakes committed by people who didn’t learn from history. Hope you aren’t one of them.

Cheers!