Léon Brillouin, the physicist who helped formalize information theory in the 1950s, proved something that sounds technical but has a leadership implication nobody talks about: acquiring information always costs energy. Not metaphorically — thermodynamically. To reduce uncertainty about a system, you must do work on it. The system doesn't hand you clarity for free. What this suggests about mental models is strange and useful: a model that feels effortless to use may be one you've stopped paying the entropic cost to maintain. It has become a compression of reality so old you've forgotten the original complexity it was built to approximate. The moments when a framework 'clicks' most smoothly are exactly the moments to distrust it — not because the framework is wrong, but because frictionlessness is the signature of a model that has quietly decoupled from its subject matter. The practical move isn't to add more models. It's to periodically pay Brillouin's price again — go back to the raw, uncompressed version of the situation and let it cost you something.

Which framework in your toolkit feels most effortless right now — and when did you last let the actual situation complicate it?

Drawing from Philosophy of Physics / Information Theory — Léon Brillouin