Great story in the current edition of National Geographic Adventure magazine looking at how to survive (almost) anything. (Apologies in advance for their screwy pagination scheme). While this is really supposed to be a story about surviving in the wilderness or in adventure, the key lesson about mental models applies even more so to the concepts of innovation and survival in the business world. Key graf:
Mental models have been the subject of intense research by psychologists for at least two decades. A classic one can be seen on the parking sign for the handicapped. It displays an image that we instantly recognize as a wheelchair, even though it looks very little like one. That's because we code information in an abbreviated form for quick reference. We can also create much more elaborate models. Most people, for example, have a complex model for driving that allows them to do so while talking on the phone and drinking coffee. Once models are established, they require no thought. They're efficient, which is probably why they were selected by evolution.
And then:
These models form the basis not only of how we act but what we perceive and believe. We tend not to notice things that are inconsistent with the models, and we tend not to try what they tell us is bad or impossible. Henry Plotkin, a psychobiologist at University College in London, refers to this phenomenon as the "primary heuristic," a tendency to "generalize into the future what worked in the past." Until Reinhold Messner climbed Mount Everest without oxygen in 1978, everyone was held back by the belief that it was impossible. Today an average of seven climbers do it every year. Human evolution had not changed in those few years. What changed was the mental model. Seymour Cray, famous for inventing the fastest supercomputers in his day, liked to hire kids straight out of college, because unlike senior engineers they hadn't yet learned what was impossible.
We're seeing this play out in the business world today. The music industry is on its last legs because it couldn't believe the model changed. The movie studios are staring into the abyss, and my bet is they'll do the lemming leap as well. Ditto for newspapers and TV stations - the model changed, their mental model did not, or at least not until it was pretty late in the game.
I'll say one thing -- articles like this charge me up. The world is changing, and fast. I better be paying attention!