Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Arab historian, noticed something that should unsettle every product manager: the very success of a system breeds the conditions for its failure. He called it 'asabiyya' — the social cohesion that drives a group to build something great — and observed that once an institution reaches dominance, it stops needing the hunger that created it. The mental models that got you here calcify into doctrine. George Kelly, the psychologist behind Personal Construct Theory, made a parallel observation about individuals: we don't see reality, we see through our constructs — and the more our constructs are confirmed, the more invisible they become. Together, these thinkers point at a specific trap in product work and in self-understanding: the frameworks that earned your credibility are now the lens through which you filter out disconfirming signals. Sunday is a good day to ask which of your 'proven approaches' you haven't seriously stress-tested in the last year — not refined, but actually challenged from the outside.

Name one framework or conviction you use regularly in your work — what evidence would genuinely change your mind about it, and when did you last encounter any?

Drawing from Islamic Historical Philosophy / Constructivist Psychology — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377) synthesized with George Kelly (The Psychology of Personal Constructs, 1955)