We’re constantly asked for examples of the “multiple mental models” approach in practice. Our standard response includes great books like Garrett Hardin’s Filters Against Folly and Will Durant’s The Lessons of History.
One of the well-known examples of this brand of thinking is Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book that opened thousands of eyes to the power of leaping across the walls of history, sociology, biology, geography, and other fields to truly understand the world.
Jared Diamond, the book’s author, is a great master of synthesis across many fields — works like The Third Chimpanzee and Collapse show great critical thinking prowess, even if you don’t come to 100% agreement with him.
Lesser known than Guns, Germs, and Steel is a follow-up talk Diamond gave entitled How to Get Rich:
… probably most lectures one hears at the museum are on fascinating but impractical subjects: namely, they don’t help you to get rich. This evening I plan to redress the balance and talk about the natural history of becoming rich.
The talk is a great, and short, introduction to “multiple mental models” thinking. Diamond, of course, does not literally answer the question of How to Get Rich. He’s smart enough to know that this is charlatan territory if answered too literally. (Three steps to surefire wealth!)
But he does effectively answer an interesting part of the equation of getting rich: What conditions do we need to set up maximal productivity, learning, and cooperation among our groups?
Diamond answers his question through the same use of inter-disciplinary synthesis his readers would be familiar with: As you read it, you’ll see models from biology, military history, business/economics, and geography.
His answer has two main parts: Optimal group size/fragmentation, and optimal exposure to outside competition:
So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don’t want excessive unity and you don’t want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.
Those are wonderful lessons, and you should read the piece to see how he arrives at them. But there’s another important reason we bring the talk to your attention, one of methodology.
Diamond’s talk offers us a powerful principle for our efforts to understand the world: Look for and study natural experiments, the more controlled, the better.
I propose to try to learn from human history. Human history over the last 13,000 years comprises tens of thousands of different experiments. Each human society represents a different natural experiment in organizing human groups. Human societies have been organized very differently, and the outcomes have been very different. Some societies have been much more productive and innovative than others. What can we learn from these natural experiments of history that will help us all get rich? I propose to go over two batches of natural experiments that will give you insights into how to get rich.
This wonderfully useful approach, reminiscent of Peter Kaufman’s idea about the Three Buckets of Knowledge, is one we see used effectively all the time.
Judith Rich Harris used the naturally controlled experiment of identical twins separated at birth to solve the problem of human personality development. Michael Abrashoff had a naturally controlled experiment in leadership principles when he had to turn around the USS Benfold without hiring or firing, or changing ships or missions, or offering any financial incentive to his cadets. Ken Iverson had a naturally controlled experiment in business principles by succeeding dramatically in a business with massive headwinds and no tailwinds.
And so if we follow in the steps of Diamond, Peter Kaufman, Judith Rich Harris, Ken Iverson, and Michael Abrashoff, we might find natural experiments that help illuminate the solutions to our problems in unusual ways. As Diamond says in his talk, the world has already tried thousands of things: All we have to do is study them and then align with the way the world works.