Every mental model you carry was built during a specific period of your life, under specific pressures — and it quietly expires when those conditions change. The pragmatist philosopher John Dewey called this 'funded experience': the stored capital of past encounters that lets us act without re-deliberating every moment. The problem Dewey identified, particularly in his later work on inquiry, is that funded experience accumulates interest — it compounds and becomes invisible infrastructure. What once was a hard-won conclusion becomes an assumption so deep it no longer feels like a conclusion at all. For leaders, this has a specific failure mode: the models built during a period of scarcity, or rapid growth, or crisis tend to survive long after those conditions have ended. The model doesn't announce its obsolescence. It just keeps running, confidently, in terrain it was never designed for. The practical discipline Dewey prescribed wasn't periodic skepticism toward your thinking — it was tracking which pieces of your 'funded experience' were earned in radically different circumstances than the ones you're now in.

Name a model you use constantly at work — a conviction about what motivates people, what makes a plan fail, what kind of pushback to ignore. When was it formed, and how different were the conditions then from now?

Drawing from American Pragmatism — John Dewey