Chapter 2 Mental Models

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”
-- John Maynard Keynes

In our research we found that one of the biggest obstacles to making creative decisions after 50 is indeed that accumulated baggage and ingrained assumptions of the past that continue to operate, despite being outmoded. These notions about the world and yourself, which we call “mental models,” can get in the way of your ability to make creative decisions after 50.

Explaining Mental Models
Mental models come in many variations and with different names: mental maps, blinders, frames, or paradigms. According to learning expert Peter Senge, they are the images, assumptions, and stories that you carry around in your head about yourself, other people, institutions, and every aspect of the world. These mental models are your internal, often unconscious, pictures of the world. Even though they are often invisible, they determine how and what you see, and they shape your actions, responses, beliefs, and values, and thus your decisions.
Mental models are formed by prior knowledge, personal and professional experience, upbringing, and education. They can be affected by stereotypes, personal biases, and ingrained habits, as well as power and ego issues.
The word ‘retirement’ is a very good example of a “mental model.” For some, retirement is seen as a well-deserved end of career, an entitlement, a well-earned rest. For others it suggests something worse than the comfort of a rocking chair. It sounds like a retreat, a hiding away, a hardly deserved punishment for all those years of endeavor. ’Senior citizen‘ is another example of a mental model. In some cultures, seniors are seen as sages, and, in others, they are a burden on society.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Mental Models
Mental models can be very useful. You need them to function and to filter through the avalanche of information you receive. They help you gather, process, interpret, and organize information and understand new, complicated situations. They help explain how the world operates. They even help you get to work each day (same route, same possible ways to avoid traffic jams, alternate roads to avoid delays). As beliefs about yourself and your abilities, they help you become successful. They provide ‘rules of the game.’ They give structure to your life. They guide behavior as values and deeply-held beliefs, and they keep you safe when they are used as personal ’standard operating procedures.’
Mental models bring purpose, a set of expectations about yourself, and an identity, whether attorney, teacher, judge, grandparent, artist, Wall Street banker, coach, or writer. Mental models call up pictures of expected behavior, responsibilities, privileges, status, entitlements, relationships, and intellectual companionship that are assumed to come with the job.
While mental models have many benefits, they also have their drawbacks. Mental models often bring with them blinders and inflexibility about the world. After 50, mental models can be particularly troublesome because they are often deeply embedded through years of reinforcement. If they have become fixed, rigid, or outmoded, they can affect your ability to see options clearly, expand your thinking beyond limited options, and make robust choices. Because they are now so ingrained, they can act like panes of tinted glass or the mirrors in the fun house at the carnival to warp your view of reality. You have lived with them for so long that you may no longer recognize the distortion they can cause.
For example, your mental model of yourself may be indelibly linked with your job or the company where you worked. Mental models defined by work can be a major barrier after 50. When you move into another phase in life, you lose that identity, not just the title and status, but a sense of yourself. You may have become what you do and have become addicted to the adrenaline that comes with the rush of ‘busyness’, with being productive. When that career disappears, you may struggle with a loss of identity. When you are stripped of these external symbols – whether voluntarily or not, you may no longer see yourself in the same way. Changes in jobs require you to shift the way you think about yourself. Changes in marital status will do the same.
After 50 (and of course even before 50!) mental models can thus limit your view on the range of alternative solutions to a new challenge. They can undermine your ability to change even when you have made a decision. You can fail to see new routes because you assume that the formula of success that has worked in the past will continue to work for all time. Mental models about life as it should be or a sense of family responsibility and security can keep you from taking a new job. New ideas may fail to gain traction because they conflict with deeply held internal images of the world and your value in it. These entrenched images can limit you to familiar ways of thinking and acting.
A new position at work, for example, after a merger can be seen as a ’step down‘ after years of status rather than an opportunity to expand your skill set or to develop new connections. Your mental model of “board member,” “consultant,” or “grandparent” can distort your ability to see that role as desirable. You may reject those new roles without examining your assumptions to see if they are indeed valid.
Redefining mental models can be challenging. Decisions to change roles and choose something unfamiliar may cause struggles with previously held ways of looking at yourself. Moving into a new setting requires you to take more initiative than if you stay in a familiar place because you have to find new friends, doctors, a church, and favorite stores. Or you may have to learn a new set of acronyms and jargon with a new job or find a new route to work. It is difficult to be the novice again after years of being viewed as an expert. You may even have to struggle to change the perceptions others have of you as you assume your new role.
For some, changing or shedding these outdated mental models is not hard. The loss of identify as a corporate officer and workaholic may not be a problem and may even be welcome. However, for many a change in mental model can be painful, even scary. You may feel as if you are losing a piece of yourself as well as your community, especially when a new mental model involves a change in family relationships or is forced on you or a new one does not quickly appear. Such a change can cause a reordering of priorities and a different approach to life to overcome the sense of loss. One participant explained:
I tried to pick up pieces of the past and cobble them together as something new that contained the old. But no aspect of that life can be recaptured because I am not the person I was. It is as if a play were stopped and another actor took my part on the stage. The setting is the same, the lines may even be the same but I am not me.

It is also hard to change mental models partly because it means giving up a sense of mastery. Psychologist Edgar Schein, in a March 2002 Harvard Business Review interview, reinforced this difficulty:
Learning anxiety comes from being afraid to try something new for fear that it will be too difficult, that we will look stupid in the attempt, or that we will have to part from old habits that have worked for us in the past. Learning something new can cast us as the deviant in the groups we belong to. It can threaten our self-esteem and, in extreme cases, even our identity.

Changing Mental Models
Because mental models can filter out certain data and can cause you to rely on decision making rules that are no longer appropriate, you need to develop the ability to recognize, challenge, and break through these limitations. There are several ways to do this. They include observing and acknowledging existing mental models, reframing old ones that need adjustment, exploring new alternatives, and ultimately replacing outworn mental models that no longer work.
The first step then in changing mental models is awareness. You can surface your mental model by asking questions to uncover assumptions and values that are at the root of your behavior, experience, perceptions, and beliefs:
· Why am I seeing the situation the way I am?
· What assumptions am I making?
· What are my beliefs about this situation?
· What other factors could explain what happened?
Once you have asked the questions to surface your mental models, you then need to put them in perspective through feedback from others. Discovery of mental models is not always something to be done alone. You need to balance internal conversations with discussions with respected colleagues and friends or with results of personal inventories and assessments.
Before moving on, you might want to check out your timeline and see if any mental models were operating at key decision points?
[What do you think about this discussion on mental models? Are there any that you have been living with that you would like to share? Any that you need to eliminate from your life in order to move on?]