Using Mental Models to Improve Your Creative Thinking

This article is the first installment in a series on mental models and how to use them to improve your creative thinking and productivity. A mental model is a basic explanation of how something works that you carry around in your head. These conceptual frameworks help us make sense of the world around us. They help us recognize what we observe and experience, figure out how things work, determine the relationships between things, and predict how things may behave in the future.

You’re already familiar with many essential mental models: the scientific method, gravity, ecosystems, hierarchical organization, supply and demand, and randomness to name just a few of the models you may use from time to time. When you see an apple fall from a tree branch to the ground, your mind instantly connects what you’re observing with the concept of gravity. Because you carry a small model of gravity (a conceptual sketch) in your head, you’re able to make sense of the world as you experience it.

​Mental models are humankind’s most powerful problem-solving and creative-thinking tools because they leverage our most distinctive capability—our capacity for abstract thought.

Charlie Munger and the Popularization of Mental Models

​The notion of mental models was first introduced in the 1940s, but it’s popularity skyrocketed in 1994 after a talk given by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time partner at Berkshire Hathaway. The USC Business School invited Munger to speak on Berkshire Hathaway’s investment strategy. The talk he delivered (A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business) turned out to be a talk on the importance of mental models. Here are a few excerpts from the beginning of Munger’s talk:

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. ... You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.

​​What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. … It’s like the old saying: To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. ... And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.

​​You may say, “My God, this is already getting way too tough.” But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.

​Munger then introduced models he uses from mathematics, science, engineering, psychology, and economics—the “basic knowledge that everybody has to have before they proceed to being really good at a narrow art like stock picking.” What Munger made clear that day is Berkshire Hathaway’s magic touch is its disciplined use of mental models to analyze businesses, explore risks and opportunities, evaluate competitive threats, and predict performance.

​Munger’s talk sparked renewed interest in mental models. Business schools, medical schools, and many other learning programs now teach students how to use mental models from different disciplines to approach new challenges and solve complex problems.

​Mental Models and Creative Work

​Understanding, learning, and using mental models is also essential for creative work. Mental models are the heart and soul of the creative process. One way to understand the work of an artist is to understand the artist’s primary mental models—their world view. This idea is especially helpful when you’re trying to understand the work of prolific artists whose work spans a range of divergent styles.

Pablo Picasso is regarded as one of the most accomplished artists of all time. Over the course of his career he changed and mastered an incredible range of styles: the Blue Period, the Rose Period, the African Period, Cubism, Neoclassicism, and Surrealism. Each period is an aesthetic expression of a different mental model. For example, the mental model that informs Cubism rejects the traditional belief that art should imitate nature—the dominant view since the Italian Renaissance. Instead of perspective, Cubism emphasizes the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane: a shift in thinking that laid the foundation for abstract art.

​Identifying your default mental models and expanding your library of models are essential to improving your creative thinking and productivity skills. Creative thinkers are self-aware thinkers. They are conscious of the lens they’re seeing the world through and are adept at trying and applying different models as the situation demands.

​As the poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “A new world / is only a new mind” (From the poem “To Daphne and Virginia”). Change your mental model and you change your world.

Mental Models and Tools

​Understanding your preferred mental models will help you select and use software tools more effectively. Why? Because it turns out that software applications are also expressions of underlying mental models. Don Norman, one of the founders of the user-centered design movement writes:

​Technology is not neutral. Each technology has properties—affordances—that make it easier to do some activities, harder to do others: The easier ones get done, the harder ones neglected. Each has constraints, preconditions, and side effects that impose requirements and changes on the things with which it interacts, be they other technology, people, or human society at large. Finally, each technology poses a mind-set, a way of thinking about it and the activities to which it is relevant, a mind-set that soon pervades those touched by it, often unwittingly, often willingly.” (Things That Make Us Smart, page 243)

​What’s Next...

​Upcoming articles in this series will help you recognize your default mental models, learn new models you can use to enhance your creativity and productivity, craft your own mental models, and learn how to choose and use software tools that align with the workflows of your preferred and most productive mental models.