Mental Model

Mental Model

Suppose high trapped in a mountain during a storm of snow or float in the sea in the life of a ship for weeks. Is there a way to their chances of survival increase? In fact, the investigation sobre why some individuals and groups of this kind of disaster that not survive while others point out the possibility that the “mental model” to adapt to the new realities of an extreme situation is an essential skill of survival.

Author on survival deep, Laurence Gonzales writes: “allen who dies of confusion dies”. The deadly confusion begins with bad mental model that does not reflect the reality, but serves as the basis for the action. The people in survival situations separates the possibility of a successful companies often accurate mental model of the organizations that do not survive.

What is the mental model of a corporation? Simply put, remove internal confusion solid mental model. The mental model is a framework that a potentially complicated strategy, making everyone in the Organization for the internalisation of the strategy and they are directed by is simplified.

Sized enterprises and create and share their internal mental model in ways that managers and employees the day day independent critical decisions that are aligned with the strategy. Without a strong mental model strategy can open to interpretation, you can paste the decision-making process, or both at the same time can occur.

Create a shared mental model was the first step in an amendment to a commercial printer. Without a shared mental model as a guide, this printer functional teams working on productivity as each one of them tried to optimize the function on its own field of his own position.

For example, was the top seller, winning the annual incentive trip to Hawaii for five consecutive years, almost single-handedly the printer business. How? Indicate the strategy for the highest quality of printing to customers who are the biggest users of print. The sales team is proud that in the main agreements with large quantities of this target group. Their mental model was essentially, “large customers, large volumes, large dollar”.

While this interpretation of the strategy seems valid, there was a fatal error: large customers with large volumes of print command also deep discounts. Worse, most of these clients have no high-quality printing high-volume, value and cost-/method-oriented provider quality that invested on the printer will print a drawback. As a result, steadily eroded profits even if the top line.

Thanks to the losses and the pressure mounted, each function blame others for the problems of the company. Functional teams that need for greater cooperation in place, were deeper in the silos. If this cooperation gap larger, was about the performance deteriorated.

A simple and powerful exercise for the construction of a shared mental model brought together the multifunctional teams. With this approach, answered each function separately a number of important issues, including:

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