Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey made a distinction that most builders of mental models never apply to themselves: the difference between a habit of mind that organizes experience and a rut that merely repeats it. Both feel identical from the inside. The grip, the ease, the sense of competence — these are the same phenomenology whether you're genuinely navigating well or just running a cached routine on novel terrain. Dewey's insight, developed in 'How We Think' (1910), was that a mental model stops being a tool the moment you stop feeling its friction — the small resistances where reality doesn't quite fit the frame. Those friction points are data. They're the model talking back. The discipline isn't building better models, which is the part everyone focuses on. It's cultivating a particular sensitivity to the moments when a trusted model goes quiet — when reality stops surprising you not because you understand it better, but because the model has begun filtering out the disconfirming inputs entirely.

If you stripped away every model, framework, or prior conviction you brought into your last major business decision, what raw information would have been left — and what would it have pointed toward?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — John Dewey (How We Think, 1910)