Howdy!
This month, we’re going to take a deep dive into two mental models that will help you think ahead while saving time and resources. How sweet of a deal is that?!
Second-Order Thinking
Second-order thinking is when you think about how your decisions will influence your future decisions instead of immediate ones.
There are three different types of “levels” for consequences:
First-order: the most immediate feelings or results of a decision
Second-order: the longer-term effect of the decision
Third-order: the significant long-term impact of the decision and eventual outcome
The key question in uncovering second-order consequences is “and then what?”. From there, mapping out the potential consequences and impacts of the different decisions through time benchmarks, similar to the probabilistic thinking’s framework:
Current = first-order consequences
Near-term = second-order consequences
Long-term = third-order consequences
If we were able to include the impact/consequences of selecting those options and clearly showing the consideration of immediate and second-order consequences before making a decision, our decision-making process will be more reputable and trustworthy in the ecosystem.
Relativity
“Time flies when you’re having fun”. Kinda.
Einstein wanted to further prove Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and ended up coming to a revelation himself: the faster we moved through space, the slower we move through time. This was eventually called time dilation.
Using the concepts of Time Dilation, when we are moving fast or when we are subjected to the “gravitational pull” of something we are attracted to, we experience time relatively slower than someone standing still doing nothing.
So what?
Similar to the theory of relativity, relativity is among different stakeholder groups are based on biases. Their “gravitational pulls” are different. When prioritizing new candidates, bugs, or customer detractors, there are two different POVs we need to take into account: the business value and the customer impact. To build empathy with your stakeholders, providing everybody with an opportunity to be heard will “slow” the conversations down (striving to achieve similar velocity) and ensuring everyone is on the same page (a constant like the speed of light).
The goal again is not to get everyone to agree to our roadmap, because we ultimately can’t please everyone, but to understand why the decisions were made.
Thought Experiments
Einstein’s usage of visualized thought experiments enabled him to test out hypotheses regarding light and space, without having to get help from his NASA friends.
One of the famous examples of Thought Experiments is the trolley problem.
The above thought experiment has had ripple effects on philosophy, neuroscience, politics, and more relevantly, research on driverless cars.
There are seven types of thought experiments, where one reason from either cause to effects or effects to causes.
Prefactual: Anticipates future outcomes from the present situation (i.e. “What was the observed outcome?”)
Counterfactual: Speculates possible outcomes if there were different pasts (i.e. “If something else happened, what would it look like today?”)
Semifactual: Speculates the extent to how similar the present would look the same if there were different pasts (i.e. “Even if it had happened differently, would it differ from today?”)
Predictive: Predicting outcomes based on existing data sets (i.e. “Based on what I know, what do I think would happen as an outcome?”)
Hindcasting: Running a forecast after an event has happened to test whether the simulation is valid/accurate (i.e. “Is our forecasting model accurate enough to predict reality?)
Retrodiction: Similar to reverse engineering, tracing back steps to understand the root cause of a specific outcome (i.e. “What is the ultimate cause of the status quo?”)
Backcasting: Imagine moving back in time, step-by-step, from the future to the present to unravel its causes (i.e. “If this future were to happen, what would be the causes of it?”)
By taking concepts of first principles thinking, second-order thinking, and probabilistic thinking, we can map them out into a thought experiment every time we need to prove a hypothesis without spending too much time and resources in proving a point (hopefully).
I’m looking for guest writers to be part of this little community! If you’d like to get featured on this, let’s chat.
Happy thinking!
🤘, Isabel