When Ibn Khaldun wrote his theory of 'asabiyyah — the invisible force of group cohesion that makes civilizations rise and collapse — he wasn't writing political theory. He was writing about the half-life of shared models. His core observation: every ruling group succeeds because it holds a working model of the world that actually fits the conditions of its moment. Then the model calcifies. The success it produced insulates the group from the feedback that would update it. Three generations, he calculated, was the typical lifespan before the model became a liability dressed as wisdom. What makes this unsettling for product leadership isn't that mental models expire — that part everyone knows. It's that the expiration is invisible from the inside. The very success generated by a model is what prevents you from recognizing when it has stopped describing reality and started substituting for it. The model that got your team to product-market fit is the one most likely to be quietly misrepresenting your current market. Ibn Khaldun's prescription wasn't 'get better models' — it was deliberate re-exposure to the friction that the current model is smoothing away.

What friction — a user complaint, a team disagreement, a metric that doesn't fit the narrative — have you been explaining away rather than sitting with?

Drawing from Islamic Historical Philosophy / Ibn Khaldunian Cyclical Theory — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377)