How we make and share mental models, for understanding and mastery

Hailey and Jase get their minds around the concept of a model. We mostly discuss mental models: how they are formed, how they are shared, and how they are improved. We also discuss how mental models are similar and different to computer models and other external models, as well as the limitations of working with models. Finally, we explore how games function as models, and as a training environment for our model-making capability.

Links to resources

Jose Ramos, Action Foresight
https://actionforesight.net/ourteam/

Our Futures game
https://www.nesta.org.uk/feature/our-futures/

Mutant Futures Program
https://actionforesight.net/mutant-futures-program/

William Gibson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson

William Gibson on Twitter
https://twitter.com/GreatDismal

Capgemini Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE)
https://www.capgemini.com/au-en/operating-model/accelerated-solutions-environment-ase/

PwC The Difference
https://www.pwc.com.au/the-difference.html

KPMG U-Collaborate
https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2017/u-collaborate.html

Joe Wasserman
https://www.joewasserman.com/

Texas Hold ‘Em (poker variant)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_hold_%27em

Stafford Beer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer

The Art of Manliness Podcast #471: Using Mental Models to Make Better Decisions
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/mental-models-decision-making/

Magic the Gathering
https://magic.wizards.com/

An Amble Twitter thread on models
https://twitter.com/theamblestudio/status/1294894509226987520

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hailey: This is Amble, the podcast where we take a disciplined wander, through the borderland between ways of working and games. I am one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider

Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake .

Hailey: This week, we are talking about models, representations that we humans make of the world around us complicated systems. They might be physical models, mental models, computer models. Anything and everything in that department, how they’re like it relates to games and ways of working, but first Jase, how’s your week been?

Jason: Yeah. I really enjoyed… Hi Hails for a start. G’day, hi, how’s it going? I really, I really, this week, I really, really, really enjoyed getting the Amble troupe together and wandering over to Jose’s futures game which he hosted in Miro with his crew. I really got a lot out of that. Enjoyed it immensely.

Hailey: Yeah.

Cool. So yeah, we have a friend Jose Ramos who is a futurist here in Melbourne [00:01:00] and you know, really kind of part of a larger scene of, of practitioners who help people think differently about the future. Right? So it’s, it’s an old practice it’s been around for a while. It’s part of the ways of working, we’re interested in, you know, how do you.

Consider different possible futures and then work backwards from that to, you know, prepare yourself in the present for all the different things that might be coming your way. And it’s a field which is just rapidly evolving. So Jose’s created this game with some of his colleagues called Our Futures which well do you want to try to explain what it, what you’re achieving there in the game, Jase?

Jason: Sure.

I mean, I think The way I would describe it is a a context like the, the game space creates a context for people to have a, a semi-structured conversation around what a potential future is. So I think you’re as, as a group, you’ve sort of formed teams of we had four of us in, in our game plus a facilitator and you’re presented with a bunch of prompts.

Now [00:02:00] you’ll have to describe, you know, the characterization of the prompts hails, but you know, those sorts of prompts set things like here’s a technology that you were asking you to think about. Here’s a style of engagement that we’re asking you to think about. Here’s a challenge that we’re asking you to think about and using those sort of prompts.

As    conversation starters. Yeah. You develop a narrative around what might be possible in a future using those ingredients.

Hailey: I think the interesting thing about this game is it’s actually one level of meta. So a futures practice is something that helps people think about the future. This game is actually for futures, practitioners who want to help people think about the future, think about different ways that they construct experiences or participatory processes. Around futures thinking. So it’s really, it’s a game for a very specific niche of people to improve their practice around engaging other people and really interesting things. So it really relates back to what we were talking about last week with [00:03:00] collaboration design.

It’s really a form of experience design.

Jason: Yeah. Yes. Totally. Yeah. It’s, it’s providing a, a means or a mechanism or a context in which people can engage with thinking about the future more easily you know, or in an entertaining kind of way. Yeah, totally. I certainly got a bunch from, it was a really, really fun afternoon.

Hailey: Yeah. I

can see that there’s a whole realm of new practices that I could learn from that. And yeah, I’m actually taking a course, one of Jose’s courses called mutant futures. It’s about discovering. New hybrid practices and yourself in it. So that’s been really cool. And yeah, I guess if there’s anyone listening

Jason: That’s a bit, sorry. That’s a bit William Gibson.

Hailey: Well, aren’t, aren’t all of us futurists    influenced by the great dismal. As he’s known on Twitter. So, yeah, if you wanna, if you want to, if you’re listening to this and you’re an aspiring practitioner, or, you know, a    game master game designer who wants to explore this area more, you could check out Jose’s work at actionforesight.net, [00:04:00] and that’s a good place to learn about all the different things that crew is doing

Jason: and put a link in the bio.

Okay.

Hailey: Cool. So let’s come back to this week’s topic of models. So I said a little bit about what those are, but Jason, you have a kind of a set piece that that’s come up that you can do.

Jason: No, it’s really just a um, you know, so in the ways of working kind of space anyone who’s engaged in a large sort of workshop design for one of the larger companies in the in this kind of collaboration and ways of working kind of space.

So the global ASE or possibly a why back in the day, or PWC is the difference or KPMG, my have heard a facilitator at some point or another, stand up at the front of the room and hold up a plane or a train or a brain, something like that and say, what is this. And everyone goes, it’s a plane or it’s a brain, and they go, what is [00:05:00] this?

And they go. Ah, it’s a model of a brain or it’s a model of a train. And the idea being is that it opens up a conversation around the, the, the difference between a model and the real world. And it opens up a conversation around what models are good for. You know, I mean, you can pull parts of a brain apart and look at them and discuss their structure and see how they relate to one another.

You can hold a car, a model of a car in your hand, and you can test ideas around what it would look like in particular configurations that you can’t. Do necessarily with the real thing. So models are exceptionally useful for helping us investigate what we might, or what we understand about what we might want for a state in the world and what we understand about a state.

And I guess that’s, that’s the piece that we’re going to pick up.

Hailey: That’s it, that’s it a physical model of another physical thing. What’s a mental model.

[00:06:00] Jason: Okay. So the, the mental models piece says, and this is I guess it’s important to, you know frame up that this is, you know, a work in progress. Like we’ve gone back and recently had a look at some of the literature and we’re probably about to misrepresent poor Joe Wasserman’s work in a, in a horrible way.

Sorry, Joe, but the. The idea of a mental model is to say, you know, we know that we carry around representations or mental representations of the way things work. When we you know say something like. Dog. I say dog, the concept of dog in my head brings up a whole bunch of associations, you know animal that I liked very much something that I can play fetch with.

You know, my friend Hailey has one called Benny. You know, all these sorts of things are associated with that’s a mental model of what a dog and, you know, a dog is, it’s a mental model. It’s a model that exists in my head that helps me link knowledge of that thing

Hailey: Benny is a good boy, for example

Jason: …to …

benny is a good boy … To an artifact in a real world, debatable when it comes to when [00:07:00] it comes to Benny.

So yeah, that’s, that’s the idea of a mental model. Mental models are the representations we carry around in our head around how things work or how things are in the world or what things do And this is, you know what we’re talking about specifically today on mental models in games and sort of what we were going to move into, because the idea is that games are reasonably good for identifying things like mental models that the conjecture in the literature is because, you know, they’re closed systems, they have identifiable rules and mechanics.

They also have identifiable outcomes. So I’ve, I’m trying to see whether or not my mental model of a, of a game state and how the game works and the relations between the entities in that game state and how they play out to generate outcomes. If I’m trying to work out. You know whether or not my mental model is accurate.

My gameplay is going to reflect that the better, I know a game, the better I’m going to play it. And games also have [00:08:00] measures for that kind of thing. How many points am I getting? Am I winning? You know, it gives you as a closed system, a way of beginning to color calibrate the idea of how close your mental model is to the way something’s actually right.

Hailey: We talked earlier about a fairly universal example of card games maybe poker or something. Could you talk us through. The way that people use mental models to sort of interact with, you know, how the rules of the game and other players at the table, how that might kind of play out in a game situation.

Jason: Sure. I think I wonder whether, I mean, poker is a good example. So say Texas, Hold’em really, really simple game to learn. You know, you’re holding two cards, all the players at the table, holding two cards, you will eventually say five cards and you have to make the best five card hand. Right? Simple set of there’s a simple set of rules there, and there’s a simple set of rules associated with the ranking of which hands are the best.

[00:09:00] Yep. Right. So you know, I know that if I’m holding a pair, if I have a pair of cards in the hand that I’m making, I want that to be as high as possible. I would like, I need that to be higher than the other people at the table in order to win. Similarly, if I want to beat a pair of cards, I have to have potentially two pairs or I have to have, you know trips or I have to have a straight, or I have to have a flush.

Four of kind right. A full house. Now that’s a simple set of rules. That model, how that game works. So I can, I can say, I understand that when I’m playing this game, this is the goal that I’m headed towards. This is the game state that I’m faced with. And you know, this is how the game will progress, and it does it the same every time.

You know, you get your two cards, you make, you know, you, you have pre-action betting, the flop comes. So three cards are dealt there’s around a betting. Turn card comes there’s around a betting river card comes, or the fifth card comes [00:10:00] there’s around a betting. And at some point, if there are, you know, more than one person left at the end of that sort of progression you show down your hands and the person with the highest hand wins.

Very very simple to understand, easy to engage with. Okay. So my mental model says, okay, I understand how I engage with this game. Here are the actions and the interactions that I have to take in order to engage with the game, but to be good at the game, there are some other dynamics that I need to understand, and that is first and foremost, that there are other people who are also competing.

I might also, you know, benefit well at the very first level. I’ll need to know things like probabilities. So, if I’m trying to improve my hand, I need to know, you know, how many potential cards are left in the deck that might improve my hand. I need to have some sort of conception of what improving my hand would look like a really sophisticated version of that might be, I need to know a range of ways that my hand could improve.

Right? So that is detail. [00:11:00] That’s layered in, on my mental model that I don’t get just from the top layer of rules. And then of course you realize that you’re playing a multiplayer game and that everyone’s trying to do that at the same time as you. So then you have to build in things like, well, what’s the mental model that I have of my, of the players at the table.

What do I believe they’re trying to do? What do I believe their range of potential plays in this sort of scenario are? And then you have to start building in things like, even more complexity into that sort of space around things like, well, to what degree do I think they’re going to diverge from standard strategic play and send me in, you know, send me false signals so that I make a a suboptimal play.

Right. All of these things are deeper and deeper elaborations of our mental model. And the conjecture is with mental models that the more accurate our mental models are of the game, state game, play players at the table, the better that we’re going [00:12:00] to do. I think it’s something like poker, that’s really easy to measure.

It’s generally measured by your, the stack of chips or the money that you make or lose in front of you.

Hailey: Nice. Yeah. So. It gives us a sense of the kind of layers of thinking and reflection and mental model calculation, making a mental model of the mind of somebody else. Who’s also making a mental model of your mind at the same time and what you think that they think.

And the sort of layers of complexity you go to in games. And, you know, maybe this is one of those overlaps between games and ways of working is that playing games is a little bit like going to the gym for your mental model. Building capabilities. As one of the things we haven’t talked about yet is.

Why do we care about getting better at making mental models?

Jason: Totally. Like, why are you know, why do so many people pay, you know, time, energy, and attention to using and, and making models? [00:13:00] Like, why is it beneficial? You know, why would people listen to someone at the front of the room saying, what is this?

You know, it’s a model. Why are models important? Yeah, totally. Did you want to elaborate on that? Like what’s, what’s your I’m interested in what your take is actually it’s

Hailey: sure. I mean, I guess the way that I think about it is there’s a world out there, you know, we can, we can get philosophical about the actual reality of that world, but regardless of where you’re at on that debate, you are an agent interacting with things outside you that at least.

Appear to most of us do not be under our control and to be separate from us, right. And to have their own external reality. And if we are trying to achieve some goal, get something done, ensure our security in order to take actions that actually have the results we want, we need to have an, an accurate model, mental model or some other kind of model of the world out there.

So that, yeah, so that we, we try [00:14:00] something and then it happens the way we expect more or less. And the risk that we fall into is that our current mental model of the world, especially as the rate of change, increases in the world is going to be incorrect out of date. And the things that we try to do are going to be are going to be wrong and they’re going to not get us where we want to be.

They’re going to get us to the opposite of where we want to be. And for individuals, you know, generally like in society and what the institutions around us and the kind of like the traffic lights and the, and you know, the curbs and the painted lines and, you know, both literal and figurative that we all live within.

Mostly, there’s not a lot of risk about getting it wrong on some really deep level. You know, you’ve got to your job, you get your paycheck, get the groceries, you get the but the more you things become chaotic or the more you try to do things on a larger level. In more complexity of systems, the more chance you have of having an incorrect    mental model and getting it wrong.

So the [00:15:00] practice of challenging your own mental model, questioning your own mental model, updating your own mental model. How you do that as an individual or in a group is crucial to actually achieving your goals.

Jason: Love it. Can we lean on that? Or, you know, sort of tease out that idea, this idea of challenging mental models, because I think that’s you know, in the, in the context of large group facilitation highlighting to people that they are using, mental models is a real key because oftentimes it’s not something that’s thought of, you know?

You know, we go to uni, we learned that the I’m just trying to think of a silent example. We learn a particular theme around how finance gets done. Right. And we go to work and we just apply it because that’s how finance gets done now. The challenges that, you know, that theorem came from a particular time.

It had a whole bunch of assumptions built into the way that, you know, model is cashed out, [00:16:00] had a whole bunch of assumptions around how firms operate in a particular market, et cetera. And as time changes. That model of how finance kind of gets done, needs to evolve and change to build in more, you know, complexities and change with how the world is changing or our understanding of the world is changing.

And if we don’t recognize that our models, like the way we engage with the world is driven by our mental models and we don’t hold the fact that they’re not necessarily true in the words of Stafford Beer, they’re just more or less useful. Then we run the risk of being undone by our assumptions or not including the types of information.

That again, would be useful in driving the outcomes that we seek to achieve. Now that’s a bit. Yeah, there’s something, there’s something in that, that I, the, the, the importance of acknowledging that we use models of the world to navigate around at, at a first blush, you know, like, [00:17:00] and for the most part.

It’s it’s really not very useful to challenge your mental models.      I’ve an experiential    mental model of how gravity works. If every step that I took in the world I was stopping and, you know, questioning my mental model and re-evaluating whether or not the next step would be the same. Do you know what I mean?

I wouldn’t get anything done very, very quickly. Right? So that, that model of my understanding of how sort of gravity works and how I move through the world is deeply embedded. And is, unconscious, largely unconscious. And it’s something that I don’t think of. Why, because it’s let’s call it life skills, unfeasible, you know, you’re not going to get anything done.

And as we move into sort of more complex spaces or more spaces that aren’t constrained by sort of necessarily the forces of nature or you know, we’re moving into more design spaces or we’re interacting with greater and greater systems that are more complex. We need to make sure that the.

Models that we’re using to represent those spaces are [00:18:00] up to the task or at least at the very least were aware of the limits of those models.

Hailey: Yeah. And once you are aware that you’re using models in you’re aware about the sort of places where it becomes more necessary to have a robust model then you can start to develop practices around how you challenge and update your own mental model. So, you know, when we were digging around doing our homework for the session we turned up this podcast on it’s a podcast called the Art of Manliness. We’ll put a link in the, in the dooby doo or wherever the links are going to go. And they had a guest Shane Parrish.

So I think people in the business and investment world probably know this name. And he’s talking about. Yeah. How the importance of mental models, the importance of keeping them up to date and coming really from a investment context, you know, if you’re trying to choose, you know, which companies to invest in which stocks to buy you want to really have robust mental models and not just lean on your old heuristics, your old ways of thinking, and also coming [00:19:00] from a intelligence government, you know, intelligence agency.

So in Canada, in this case, but how do you make strategic decisions about how to intervene in world events for the you know, advantage of your nation which is, you know, not the kind of stuff that we’re necessarily on about here at Amble, but those are the kinds of practices that Parrish was talking about were really personal and really practical.

He had really boiled it down to, you know, you don’t always have time. To go out and rigorously rebuild your mental model through a sophisticated multi-step you know, research inquiry and consulting with peers and visualizing and the way we do in these workshops quite often. There’s a sort of, it’s like the thing you were saying with gravity, there’s this sort of like you know A dilemma or like a ratio of like time spent on your mental model versus like the value you’re getting versus the opportunity cost of all the things you could be doing, actually actualizing and acting on your mental models, especially in, you know, highly competitive, fast moving worlds, like intelligence and business investment, you know, [00:20:00] it needs to be able to do it quickly.

And so yeah, that podcast, he had a lot of just really nice Specific things around, just have two steps that you do. One is like, stop, breathe, and realize that like you have a mental model and you’re making assumptions, you know? And then the second is like, start asking yourself questions. Maybe have a few questions that you always start with.

And sometimes in five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes of Googling, you can very quickly update your mental model. And it’s actually really just this, this discipline of thinking that way. And I guess that when you were talking about poker, that’s where I was starting to see some of the overlap here is that people who played games, I think especially competitive multiplayer games often are very robust about they have these steps.

Every time a hand comes, they’re going, you know, they, I remember when I used to play and I was pretty bad at poker. And they used to say, oh, I had you on Kings. I believe you had me on you mean you had a theory about what I had in my hand. I didn’t have that at all. I was just playing it at that initial level that you described Jase and sometimes just winning out of [00:21:00] luck.

Yeah, so it’s the, I think that there’s a lot of habit building that gamers do around yeah. Forming really robust mental models in order to win. Whether that’s that’s competitive game against their their opponents or whether it’s a cooperative game where we’re building collectively through our conversation, building a mental model where the game state is now and where we think it’s going.

Jason: So that’s sorry. Yeah. I’m just going to tie that into, I guess what we’re on. You know, what this kind of discussion is about or aim to kind of do is it’s saying, well, You know, how are the skills that gamers have potentially useful in the real world. And, you know, if you have gamers as folks who are really, really good at all, often good at, okay.

Engaging with mental models, flexibly and updating them and playing with them and being aware of them, that we use them to kind of make decisions and form outcomes, et cetera. Then. Yeah. It’s, there’s something in it. There’s there’s is there something in how a game is bringing that kind of skill [00:22:00] into the domain of better decision making through developing, using iterating, making explicit mental models?

Yes, I think there’s

okay. Yeah. Right.

Hailey: Well, maybe this is now we can talk about some of the other things we found when we went poking around. You mentioned Joe Wasserman earlier and,

Jason: and his work. Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah. That’s and no, you’re right. Cause it’s important to sort of get a feel for whether or not these sorts of hypotheses backed by any of the literature or anyone else’s sort of working in this kind of space or, you know, what’s happening in the domain.

What’s interesting. And we did, we both went out and read the a couple of the Joe Wasserman,

Hailey: Yeah my sense is that the big idea, I think that he and others in the space are trying to grapple with is this theory that games can potentially model reality or they can be a model of a real system. And then gamers build mental models of games.

In order to succeed at them. And [00:23:00] so if you could build mental models of games, which in turn are effective models of reality, then gamers could use their mental models of games to also make effective mental models of reality. And that like games can be a translation point between complex systems in the real world.

And you know, and the mental models of humans who then can be empowered to make better decisions. So it’s another sort of tool and tool kit of what Shane Parrish is talking about with just stopping and breathing. You know, if we’ve really got to face down something complex in the world, maybe we can make a game of it.

And this is something that happens. So there’s examples. There’s plenty of examples that we found out there that we can point to of people doing this. But what hasn’t been done yet is like the deep research to prove. Like that, like, there’s a what’s the, the law of transference of meaning or something like that along the whole chain of real-world game to brain.

Jason: Yeah. There’s something, I mean, look, There’s something really, really deep in that the idea being is that. A [00:24:00] real world complex system are generally open systems. They’re incredibly normative. They don’t have boundary conditions, their boundary conditions that we put on them.

Hailey: That’s what normative means that it’s human norms or ideas that define the edges.

Jason: Yeah, that sort of inform that’s exactly it. Yeah. And then the whereas game systems, the reason that I think you get this interest in knowledge transference the, you know, mental model matching as a as a theory of competence. So all this kind of stuff emerging in in games is because games are closed systems.

It has very, very firm and there’s a, there’s a set rule structure. That you can outline in you know, a couple of pages or if you’re playing a deep Euro in 64 pages.

Hailey: Yeah, so, so even, even though games are closed systems, there’s still this sense. And even some level of evidence that By playing through these closed systems together or individually, we can actually get a deeper understanding of the open systems or at least be less [00:25:00] stupid about this open systems or consider more possibilities about those open systems that we weren’t considering before.

Jason: Yeah.

Yes. And the massive caution being is that a closed game system is not, you know an open complex system.

Hailey: The map is not the territory.

Jason: The map is not the territory in this sort of scenario. And it’s complicated by the fact that as soon as we begin engaging often in these sorts of complex systems in the real world, we actually change right.

The rules and dynamics that are out

Hailey: So we play game. We’ve got some bright ideas about the system we go and we change the system and then we keep playing the game and it’s not updated, you know, so that we have to actually have a sort of feedback loop. If we’re using the game as a model, and maybe this is just, I want to drop in a good place where this is essentially the same dynamic with computer models.

When people say, oh, the climate models say right, or we did an epidemiology model, which is, or we did a model about voters in this election, which said model or an [00:26:00] economic model, which says this is where the economy is going, or what’s going to happen this year. It’s the same dynamic. We make this a, you know, a computer model is, is, is unlike a game in that you’re not like having humans kind of interacted every step, but it’s a series of if then a rules, if this happens, then this happens, then this will happen.

And, and it kind of computes these facts. And often what computer modelers do is try to come up with a model based on the evidence, which they think represents the real system. And then they just like change all the different variables into every configuration that they can afford to, to, and run the model kind of a thousand times.

And look at those results kind of as an aggregate spread of like, this is the clusters of different possible things that happened in our model. Depending on different conditions that we put in at the beginning. And that gives a picture of yeah. How they think the system works or where they think it’s likely trending or.

Well, we, you know, we saw that if if voters started to pull this way at this point, then this person was more [00:27:00] likely to get elected at this point in our model. Oh, We’re seeing that in reality, we think now maybe this is what’s going to happen down the stream in reality. Hm. Yeah, but the, you know, it’s in a sense, it’s the same dynamic.

The model, the computer model is a closed system with really a finite set of possibilities. And it’s only modeling a fraction of all the different things that are going on in the world. And yet somehow it’s still useful.

Jason: Yes. Still useful. Yeah, because it allows us to, I guess if we have a model that’s, that’s reasonably accurate and I think this is pulling us back into the, the the Wasserman work and we have a model that’s reasonably accurate, our performance.

Is going to be better, you know, or, or back to the podcast, kind of conjecture. If you have an ability to stop and question your mental model and make it and update it and make it a good one, your strategic decisions in business life, whatever it is, are going to be better. There’s probably two threads that we need to pull on.

One is to sort of that idea of well, can we [00:28:00] demonstrate that, you know, accurate mental models. Equal better gameplay. And two is the piece around when we’re doing the building mental models that represent really deeply complex systems that involve lots of folks. How do we make sure that the assumptions that go into them and are expressed in them are representative of a, the involved that, that really complex environment, but then be accessible to people who are going to be affected by that kind of stuff.

Hailey: Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s what, and that’s what Wasserman really does in the work that he’s done over the last that’s like three or four years is go, I’m just looking at this front end of the chain, which is the connection between players. Mental models and the actual game system and how the game system works.

And also what, what moves can be demonstrated to be the superior moves and how quickly people learn those. And so there’s this sort of second [00:29:00] big piece of the chain, which sort of connects the game to the real world which is a horizon for future research. And maybe it has been done in some other parts of the world about the relationship between models and, and the real world.

As the current research that really just focuses on that first chain, but there’s some interesting stuff that came out of that.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, I really, I, yeah. I mean the fact that he used dominion and hive as you know, tactile board games as, as ways of doing the study, I really enjoyed the insight around You know, with repeat place or one of the concerns, you know, the hypothesis was with repeat play, you get better and your mental model gets better.

And it certainly showed that improvement. In gameplay. So the more you’re exposed to multiple plays, the better your gameplay became. But that then plateaued at a particular point, you know, you didn’t get, you know, you didn’t keep getting better and better and better and better. Like it plateaus off, you get to a certain level of competence, however, your ability to understand what’s going [00:30:00] on and articulate the dynamics that are involved in the game, the sorts of decisions that you’re making and why you’re doing that, that did continue to grow.

You get better and better as you engage in a environment at being able to understand or make meaning of the sorts of decisions that you’re making, rather than

Hailey: just to play that back. As you played more games, you got better at winning the game, succeeding at the game, but at a certain point, that plateaued.

So you didn’t keep becoming just a, it wasn’t a straight line towards mastery. And these experiments were in the the tens. And then in the second study, maybe the hundreds of plays. But then in terms of understanding of the mental model, that straight-line continued, even through the hundreds of plays, like people understood it more deeply.

I’m curious to just like I have in my mind, I’m like, why is it that the mastery tails off or the success tails off? What do we think as people who say, have been playing magic for a long time, you know, which is pretty equivalent in terms of a a highly [00:31:00] competitive

Jason: totally it’s I mean, I think, I think it’s, I’m reasonably, it’s definitely reasonably approachable.

Now there’s this idea that, you know, you get to a particular point you’re of gameplay where the sorts of gains that you get from understanding the game more deeply incremental, you know, you get to a particular point where you’re at a, at a reasonable level and then every kind of step after that.

Is really, really hard won. there’s a difference between being able to turn up to your local F and M game night at your friendly, … local game store and be sort of competitive and then being able to play consistently on say the magic, the gathering pro tour, you know, the, the level of competence that required is, is much deeper.

And the increments of mastery that are required take a lot more effort to sort of grow them. Right. Sort of understanding that’s required.

Hailey: And also maybe because these games involve luck and the level of variance as they call it. The, the added benefit of that deep understanding of complexity becomes a little bit harder [00:32:00] to convert into wins. .

Jason: Nice. Yeah, totally. Yes.

Hailey: If you compared , this, this, these kinds of mastery, if you had a way of comparing, like in an apples to apples way, the mastery kind of trajectory. In, in like chess versus magic might have different loops because of that, because chess has no variance, you know, there’s no luck in a chess game.

I kind of imagined that it’s like, there’s a point where yeah. Your mastery increases really quickly. And then because you’re playing against other people, you hit this, these kind of like plateaus, I feel like where you’re meeting other people. Who have kind of all done the easy road of mastery. And then you start creeping up again, as you break through, if you become really committed.

And there’s also factors just like your mental discipline and how good you are at in the moment, taking a deep breath, not letting your heart rate runaway with you and you know, spending the appropriate amount of time to go through a mental process to work out, you know, what’s the right line to win here based on my mental model.

it’s a little like [00:33:00] you know, when you’re drafting on magic arena and you can draft against the bots and you can take as much time as you want to make a decision versus when I’m learning a new set, you know, I often pause my draft. I go, and I read the literature about the cards. Yes. You know, there’s a new set that just came out and that’s what I’m thinking of doing.

I’m thinking of going and playing against the bots first so that I can, I can take my time and really learn the cards before I go and spend my resources.

Jason: So what’s the importance of that? Hails, what do you, what do you think the importance of that is? Because what the, what that’s, what that’s saying is that there’s a, some sort of correlate between Yeah, what that’s saying is that

Hailey: it’s, I think it’s about the, this it’s this like time to like efficiency of action kind of calculation, like using and updating a mental models happens in real life.

In real time, you know, in a context, we can’t just pause the world and figure it all out [00:34:00] to the Nth degree. You know, we have to kind of. Make this trade-off between resources invested time taken on the deep thinking. And you know, time taken, just acting now on the mental model.

Jason: So what benefit there, I guess the thing that I’m trying to get to is, you know, when we’re thinking about what advantage is there in understanding of like investing time, energy, and effort to understand a mental model.

So going through repeat plays, what’s what sort of benefit does that confer? Do you know what I mean? Is there, so the conjecture in that is. You know, on a, on a track of mastery, actually, maybe not everyone needs to be a on the MTG pro tour and has the kind of time interest inclination to be dipping into the really minute kind of you know mental model updating that’s required to capture the subtleties in particular plays at that layer.

Right. But Competence requires at least engaging in it and knowing, you know, being able to play competently requires [00:35:00] engaging with it up to at least a particular level. Does that, is that sort of, I guess I’m interested in what the, what the rub of that is.

Hailey: Here’s something from the podcast that I mentioned earlier with Shane Parrish he, he said that there’s a much higher value in not being stupid.

Then there isn’t being brilliant. Yep. So a lot of … people want to update their mental model to discover the hidden possibility that’s going to kind of help them find like this magic you know pathway through that nobody else has seen. It’s kind of like magic players who want to play janky combo decks that like, you know, can do, or they are a fancy place syndrome where they want to do the really cool play because it shows how brilliant they are at finding that line.

But actually it’s about not doing dumb stuff every day over the long haul. Which gets you the add up in sort of success.

Jason: So what’s the benefit of that then in the context of, you know, mental model revision and that sort of thing, what are [00:36:00] we saying in that, in that space?

Hailey: But I think the way you can think about it is that every day you are using mental models to make decisions all the time.

And there might be a lot of areas in which you are being, you’re being stupid. So to speak, like you’re just being suboptimal, you haven’t managed to learn something that’s actually right there for you to learn. And if you were to just develop some new habits around updating your mental model that you might find yourself over the long haul, just decreasing the number of stumbles that you make.

Nice. And don’t get hung up on the brilliant plan.

Jason: Okay. So. Then how does that that’s probably a really, really good segue in terms of group processes. So the challenge, you know, and one of the things that we’re interested in investigating is maybe not the minutiae of how all this sort of stuff cashes out and works, but how do you.

Bring literacy and knowledge of, and understanding of the use of mental models in [00:37:00] collaborative or group kind of processes. Cause you know what we’re talking about in playing poker or playing magic, the gathering, or, you know updating your own personal mental models through habit or discipline or rigor.

And you know, like checking in on Google for instance is a very individual pursuit. What happens when we’re you know, trying to do collective action or group action, which requires us as people to, to have shared mental models of the world and a shared understanding of how our engagement with the world is going to change it.

That’s is that something we want to dip into?

Hailey: I think we can start to talk about it. I think this might be an, a sense that. A whole episode into itself. I think the way that I would break into that is that throughout, if you can imagine the whole process, you know, we described, and the previous episode about how a collaboration works from kind of coming together, creating the container, exploring possibilities More deeply starting to converge to a particular set of [00:38:00] possibilities and then leaving the facilitative space and everybody actually going and individually trying to act towards the goal that hopefully they agreed to in the facilitated space, there are models happening at every step, individual mental models, shared mental models.

Actual externalized representative models that we may have created in the facilitated space. Yeah. Even the financial model, the spreadsheet created the diagram or that was created afterwards in the working group and then sent around by email. These are all models that are trying to, and they do so many different jobs.

The process of model making in and of itself is often a really great way to surface assumptions or people’s desires that they weren’t articulating very clearly to kind of get people on the same page. As well as then, once you kind of worked through all the differences in values and points of view and worldviews and opinions, even if you get everyone kind of on the same page for like a vision and values, you still need models to help them kind of work from the future.

They agree. They want back to, you [00:39:00] know, back to here and how we actually influenced the system or in, so you’re, you’re using deploying, updating and revising shared models at every point in that process. And so more literacy around that. I think is, is crucial. And I think often the challenge is the more people you try to engage and people with less time to get fully immersed in the deep complexity of whatever problem you’re trying to engage with.

The more you need to find ways to translate those models down. And so there’s this idea of toy models or So this is where a game I think can come in where maybe a very committed immersed group who feels they’ve really arrived at an answer and need to bring other people along, can potentially use the game to help other people kind of catch up to where they are.

And obviously there’s sort of power and transparency issues around, oh, this bunch of eggheads went away and made a model. And now they’re just convincing it with the game.

Jason: That’s, that’s what I’m actually picking up though. But that’s, that’s part of the reason that you seek to convene really diverse [00:40:00] groups of folks.

And it’s not just to avoid the group of eggheads, moving into a room and coming up with a model and then trying to convince other folks to use it. It’s also because of the very real effect that different perspectives bring in terms of highlighting. Components of a world space that are worth paying attention to, for instance you know, the classic human centered design example of you don’t get to the helicopter unless you go through the bear.

Story. You don’t know that one, that’s a [?]. You have Pacific Power & Light. The idea being is that you need representation from across an organization. In order to draw on the genius of the group, you never know where a good solution is going to come from, and actually not having representation from across a diverse group included means that your mental, the, the model that that group builds might get.

Is, could be limited by the assumptions built into the shared mental model of the group. It, does that make sense? Yes. Yeah.

Hailey: Look, I feel like that’s like, we just [00:41:00] stepped, you know, and we kind of climbed a first, you know, hill of understanding models and we’ve started going up to the second hill and we’re seeing this, you know, whole now mountain range of stuff.

So maybe that’s a good place to start to wrap up. And say that in a future episode, we can go deep on the role that models play in collaborative process. Yeah. So let’s, let’s finish up there just as a sign-off. Jason, did you play any interesting games this past week? Anything you want to share about

Jason: other than    Jose’s game?

I haven’t really done a bunch of game this week, how about yourself

Hailey: I’m gonna put you on the spot then tell me the story about Garruk and his mental model.

Jason: [Laughs]

it’s been one of those episodes Hails. Yes. Sure. No worries. So we had in like a in D & D characters who hit like level 13, which is yeah, pretty significant. That’s starting to get really good up there. I’ve certainly never played a D & D campaign [00:42:00] where we’ve reached that kind of level before.

And one of our party actually died during a fight, but like, Like legitimately went through three death saves, so failed a death save and then got attacked whilst unconscious and got a crit in that kind of space. So then lost an immediate next to death saves. This is an example of Mental models possibly.

I’m not lining up because I, Jason, as a player of Garruk, the half-orc barbarian proceeded to rush over to my fallen comrade kill the monster that was in front of him. And, and then the next round, try and cast cure wounds to stabilize him, which is normally what you would do if people are making death saves.

And the DM says, you know, Garruk cast this spell and nothing happens. I’m like, What so getting so Garruk, the half OD barbarian turns around and, you know, seeks is playing an ancestral guardian barbarian. And for the record and sort of is sort of appealing to the ancestor saying, you know, am I not worthy?

What’s what’s happening here? [00:43:00] And the whole reason that this was happening is because. Jason, the player’s, mental model didn’t realize that taking a crit when you when you were down and attack sort of burnt off the last two    death saves. Yeah. So,

Hailey: but that led to actually some really more authentic gameplay because you had a really true separation between player knowledge and character knowledge, which meant that your character did something really kind of on theme.

Totally. Why am I not worthy? I spelled it. Right. But if you had known as a player, ah, it’s because the third death save and that thing’s actually dead, then you might’ve had Garruk acting out. Oh, I they’re actually already dead. I’m not even gonna spend this, you know, this healing spell

Jason: totally made for a really interesting kind of narrative moment.

And that’s something that we’ll, we’ll continue on. Look good news for anyone who’s following the ongoing campaign of the folks here that our fighter, our, our fighter actually did survive. Well, he’s, he’s alive again. [00:44:00] He didn’t, James didn’t have to reroll. So

Hailey: Amazing things happen in D and D.

Jason: This is true.

Hailey: Thanks for coming to our episode about models.

I think this is something we, we have a Twitter thread out there already on @TheAmbleStudio on Twitter. So you can check in with that where, when we find bits of research or interesting things, we’ll be dropping it into that thread and sort of refreshing that thread regularly. So feel free to look at that or resources into that.

And yeah, we hope to have a chat with you there and we’ll see you next time.