William James, the American pragmatist, observed that most people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. For product managers, this lands hard: what gets called 'strategic planning' is often just the current mental model wearing new clothes. James's pragmatism held that an idea's truth is measured by what it actually does — not by how coherently it hangs together in a deck. This connects surprisingly well to Alfred Korzybski's general semantics principle that 'the map is not the territory' — meaning the danger isn't having a model, it's forgetting the model is a simplification that will eventually betray you. The practical move: before your next planning session, identify one assumption your team has treated as bedrock for over six months and explicitly ask what evidence would force you to abandon it. Not refine it. Abandon it.

What is one mental model you use daily in your work that you've never seriously tried to break — and what are you protecting by not trying?

Drawing from American Pragmatism / General Semantics — William James (Pragmatism, 1907) and Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)