When a map is working well, you stop seeing it as a map. This is the hidden danger in every mental model you rely on — not that it's wrong, but that it becomes invisible. The 19th-century philosopher Hans Vaihinger argued in his neglected masterwork *The Philosophy of 'As If'* that all useful fictions — economic models, legal categories, causal explanations — work precisely because we treat them as real rather than constructed. The scaffolding disappears into the building. For product leaders, this is the moment a mental model quietly becomes an ideology: when 'jobs-to-be-done' stops being a lens and starts being the world, you've lost access to everything it can't see. Vaihinger's remedy was to practice what he called 'conscious fictionalism' — holding your most useful tools with a slight, deliberate looseness, knowing they're approximations that work until they don't. Before your next planning cycle, identify the one model your team hasn't questioned in over a year. That's almost certainly the one doing the most invisible work right now.

Which model in your current work would be hardest for your team to publicly doubt — and what does that resistance tell you?

Drawing from Neo-Kantian Fictionalism / Philosophy of As-If — Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of 'As If', 1911)