Conceptual Rhymes

An evolving list of ideas that overlap across frameworks, domains, and mental models.
Last Updated: February 18, 2026

• Inner Voice
  • Jim Loehr on the Knowledge Project realizing that the way he talked to his children would become their inner monologue
  • Peter Attia with a technique to consciously reshape his inner voice as part of his therapy.
• Management and Change
  • Slack by Tom DeMarco: management pays for change via trust
  • Under the Hood by Stan Slap proposes that an organization’s culture exists to protect itself and offers tactics to build the trust required to channel that energy into pursuing the company’s mission instead.
• Dealing with Tradeoffs
  • Will Larson offers a technique for handling tradeoffs: 1) Two-dimensional tradeoffs always disappoint someone 2) You can usually make a tradeoff that doesn’t disappoint anyone by introducing a new dimension
  • Roger Martin specifically seeks apparent tradeoffs to find strategic advantages
  • Eli Goldratt goes further with his Evaporating Cloud process, part of the Theory of Constraints, which seeks to eliminate the conflict in any tradeoff by listing and challenging its underlying assumptions.
• Anticipating unintended consequences¹
  • Theory of Constraints: Negative Branch Reservations
  • Gary Klein’s Pre-mortem
• Creativity emerging from discipline
  • Peter Compo’s The Emergent Approach to Strategy has a section on how creativity works by combining rigorous discipline at a low level with an unconstrained freedom at higher levels.
  • Tony Gilroy claims that much of the thematic weight of Andor spontaneously emerged from his obsession with the details.
  • Brad Inglesby describes how the details of the characters in Task generated the story’s direction.
• Open Mindedness
  • Assertive inquiry, a technique developed by Roger Martin at Proctor & Gamble based off the work of Chris Argyris, which says that effective communication needs to blend advocacy for one’s ideas with open minded inquiry into other’s opinions.
  • Amazon’s Are Right, a Lot leadership principle describes having strong judgment built by receiving feedback from the right people. The “work to disconfirm their beliefs” sentence near the end makes it clear that being right is not a static attribute of a leader but a dynamic state that requires the willingness to be “wrong” about things.