The mental model constraint

Philip Johnson-Laird’s mental model research established the foundational account of why option generation is cognitively constrained. The decision-maker generates options from the mental model they hold of the domain: the categories, patterns, relationships, and solution types that their prior experience and knowledge have made available. The mental model determines which options are psychologically available for generation, before any deliberate option-generation effort begins. Options that require the imagination of a category that does not yet exist in the decision-maker’s mental model are not available for generation from that model; they require either a different mental model or the deliberate effort to move beyond the current one.

For the founder, the mental model constraint means that the industry narrative, the competitive framework, and the category definitions that constitute the founder’s picture of their market are simultaneously the structure within which options are being generated and the structure that makes certain options invisible. The option that would require reframing the customer, the problem, or the category is not merely difficult to generate; it is psychologically unavailable from within the mental model that defines the market as the founder currently understands it.

The empirical evidence that option generation determines outcomes

Paul Nutt’s large-scale organisational decision research provided the most directly available empirical evidence for the option generation claim. Analysing 356 significant organisational decisions, Nutt documented a consistent relationship between consideration set breadth and decision quality: decisions preceded by wider, more diverse option generation showed higher subsequent performance and lower rates of reported regret than decisions made from narrower consideration sets, independently of the quality of evaluation between the options. The quality of evaluation between two options produces less decision quality improvement than generating a third option to evaluate alongside the original two.

Nutt also documented the most dangerous specific decision pattern: the single-option decision, where the decision-maker has identified one option and is evaluating whether to adopt it, with no other options generated. Nutt’s research found that a substantial proportion of significant business decisions were made from single-option consideration sets; and that single-option decisions were associated with substantially worse outcomes than decisions made from broader consideration sets. The evaluation step, which the decision-maker typically experiences as the primary decision activity, was following an option generation step that had already determined the quality ceiling of the decision.

The availability constraint on what gets generated

Daniel Kahneman’s availability heuristic research predicts the primary mechanism through which the consideration set is narrowed before evaluation begins. Options are generated from whatever is most cognitively available in the decision-maker’s mental framework: the familiar solution types, the approaches that have worked before, the strategies that the industry narrative treats as legitimate, and the options that peers in the same context are considering. The option that is genuinely novel, requiring the imagination of a category not yet in the founder’s mental model, is simultaneously the option least likely to be generated and the option most likely to represent the kind of strategic reframing that determines competitive outcomes.

The availability constraint is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It is a structural feature of how the brain generates possibilities. The options most available for retrieval are the ones that recent experience, emotional salience, and the current cognitive framework have made accessible; and the generation process produces those options first, most fluently, and with the most apparent relevance. The option that requires stepping outside the current framework requires either a deliberately constructed process for doing so or the encounter with a mental model different enough from the current one to make different options visible.

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Widening the consideration set deliberately

Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s decision research documented the most directly applicable deliberate intervention for the option generation problem: the widening of the consideration set through structured questioning produces measurably better decision outcomes than more thorough evaluation between a pre-existing narrow set. Their specific questioning approaches, including asking what else could be done, what would have to be true for a fundamentally different approach to work, and what a person with a different set of constraints would do, produce consideration set expansion that the evaluation-focused decision process does not generate on its own.

The finding that quality improvement from deliberate option generation exceeds quality improvement from deliberate evaluation improvement has a direct implication for the founder who is investing effort in decision quality. The return on improving how options are evaluated is lower than the return on improving how many and how diverse the options being evaluated are. The deliberate widening of the consideration set, before evaluation begins, is the higher-leverage intervention.

The outsider perspective and option generation

Matthew Syed’s cognitive diversity research predicts the structural solution to the consideration set narrowing that any single mental model produces. The options that are invisible within the founder’s current mental model are frequently visible within the mental models of people from different domains, backgrounds, or cultural contexts. The cognitive diversity that produces broader option generation is not merely a source of intellectual variety; it is the structural correction for the availability constraint that a single mental model imposes.

The implication for the founder is that the consideration set is expanded not primarily through more deliberate thinking within the current mental model but through deliberate exposure to mental models different enough from the current one to make different categories of option visible. The advisor from a different industry, the team member with a different professional background, and the customer who uses the product in ways the founder did not anticipate are all sources of the mental model diversity that produces options the founder’s own consideration process cannot generate.

The pivot and the option generation failure

Research on startup pivots documents the option generation failure at the most commercially consequential available decision point. The pivots that produced the most commercially significant outcomes were those that genuinely explored a new category, a genuinely different customer, problem, or business model, rather than those that optimised within the original category. The genuinely transformative pivot is not the product of better evaluation of options already in the consideration set. It is the product of an option generation process that went outside the original mental model entirely and found a category that was not visible from within it.

The failure mode that the option generation research most directly predicts is the founder who iterates within their current mental model, evaluating increasingly refined versions of the original approach, while the most commercially consequential option remains outside the consideration set because it requires a category shift that the current mental model does not permit. The question the research supports asking before the evaluation begins is not which of the current options is best but whether the current options exhaust the genuinely available space.

If the experiences described in this article are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1983). Mental Models. Harvard University Press. Nutt, P.C. (2002). Why Decisions Fail. Berrett-Koehler. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2013). Decisive. Currency. Syed, M. (2019). Rebel Ideas. John Murray. Galef, J. (2021). The Scout Mindset. Portfolio. Epstein, D. (2019). Range. Riverhead.