When you're deep in a sales cycle or underwriting a risk, you're doing something most people never notice: you're not just analyzing data, you're constructing a story about the future. The 14th-century North African scholar Ibn Khaldun's younger contemporary, the Venetian merchant and philosopher Christine de Pizan, isn't who you'd expect here — but consider instead the medieval Jewish philosopher and logician Gersonides, who argued in 'The Wars of the Lord' that humans make predictions not from facts alone, but from the particular 'form of inference' their training has built into them. Pair that with what cognitive scientist Philip Johnson-Laird called 'mental models' — the invisible scaffolding through which we simulate possible futures — and something sharp emerges: the categories your industry trained you in don't just help you see risk and opportunity, they actively prevent you from seeing what falls outside those categories. A banker frames everything as a credit problem. An insurer frames everything as a probability distribution. A salesperson frames everything as an objection to overcome. The framework that makes you competent also makes you selectively blind. The practical move isn't to abandon your expertise — it's to deliberately name the frame you're operating in before a high-stakes conversation, and ask whether the situation actually fits it.

Think of a deal, policy, or project that went wrong. What category did you put it in from the start — and did that category ever get questioned before the outcome?

Drawing from Medieval Jewish Philosophy combined with Cognitive Science — Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom, The Wars of the Lord, 1329) & Philip Johnson-Laird (Mental Models, 1983)