Framing Problems Through Mental Lenses.

Let’s say we have a favorite restaurant we’ve been going to almost every day for weeks. One Friday afternoon, we walk in and see it’s half empty. We think this is strange since it's Friday, and the place is usually full. Why are there fewer customers?

There are multiple approaches to think about the above situation. However, we can focus on reframing the problem by try different lenses. Through a financial lens, we might notice prices increasing and pull the model of price elasticity: higher prices lead to lower demand. Through a math lens, we could consider seasonality or regression to the mean: maybe we caught a peak week and traffic is returning to normal.

The example is simple because we understand restaurants. Though for unfamiliar problems, we need a more deliberate approach: shifting perspectives to see what we might be missing.

Many people call everything a “mental model,” but it helps to separate the two.

A mental lenses are perspectives or frame of references, while a mental models are simplified representation of how something works. In the previous example, we might have chosen a math lens to understand a situation. But we have many mental models to chose from this field. For example, regression to mean is a mental model we can pick from the the math lens.

We consciously select the mental lens through which we the situations and pick the most helpful mental model we have available.

The active choice is important because our brain will default to whatever pattern it learned in the past to understand a situation. This can be useful but can also blind us. Anaïs Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” For this reason, actively switching lenses can make the difference between a simplistic or wrong answer and the right one.