Concepts (page 34)
- Structure Before Process
Richard Hackman's central practical claim is that how a team is designed matters far more than how it is subsequently handled, and that coaching only pays once the structure is right. Put the other…
- Substitution
Substitution is what the fast, automatic part of the mind does when a hard question has no ready answer: it answers an easier question instead, and translates the answer back onto the original scale…
- Sunk Cost Fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to let unrecoverable past spending decide present behaviour. Richard Thaler named it in 1980; Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer tested it across ten experiments in…
- Supernormal Stimulus
A supernormal stimulus is an artificial stimulus that exceeds anything in nature on the dimension an instinct is tuned to, and therefore captures that instinct more powerfully than the real thing…
- Surfing the Urge
Surfing the urge is a technique from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: when a craving arrives, observe its physical sensations with curiosity and let it pass, neither suppressing it nor obeying it…
- Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias is reasoning from the cases that made it, because those are the only ones still visible. The failures left no trace, so the pattern found among the winners looks like a cause when…
- Switch Cost
Switch cost is what moving attention between tasks charges you, and the charge is not the interruption's length but the reorientation on either side of it. The evidence our notes rest on is Foerde…
- Tanha
Taṇhā, Pali for thirst, is what the Second Noble Truth names as the origin of dukkha. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta gives it in three varieties: thirst for sensual pleasure, thirst for existence…
- Techno-Panic
A techno-panic is the recurring pattern in which a new medium is blamed for a decline in the young. The lineage is long enough to be embarrassing: writing, the printing press, the radio, comics…
- Temptation Bundling
Temptation bundling is Katherine Milkman's technique of making something you want available only alongside something you should do, so the want supplies the motivation and the restriction supplies…
- Tend-and-Befriend
Shelley Taylor's 2000 argument that fight-or-flight is not the whole stress response: under threat, people also tend, soothing distress in themselves or a dependant, and befriend, actively building…
- The 5 Whys
The five whys is a root-cause technique from the Toyota Production System: ask why roughly five times in a row to move past a surface symptom and reach the cause underneath it. Toyota's own…