Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Indian philosopher, argued that every conceptual category — including your most trusted ones — is only valid relative to the framework that generated it. Change the framework, and the category doesn't just shift in meaning; it loses its ground entirely. His term for this was śūnyatā — often translated as 'emptiness,' but more precisely: the absence of inherent, self-sufficient existence in any concept or thing. The practical sting for a product leader is this: your mental models aren't just tools you use; they're also the invisible scaffolding that decides which problems can even be seen. A model doesn't fail by giving wrong answers — it fails silently, by making certain questions unaskable. The discipline Nagarjuna implies isn't skepticism, and it isn't model-rotation. It's periodically asking not 'is this model accurate?' but 'what kind of problem-space does this model require to feel useful?' — because the answer tells you exactly where you've been building on hidden assumptions you've never interrogated.

For one model you reached for instinctively this week — what kind of situation does it need to be true in order to feel like the obvious choice?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE)