How Mental Models Add Value to Civil Servants’ Experiences

“If the facts (experience) don’t hang together on a lattice of theory, you don’t have them in usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both direct and vicarious, on this latticework of models.” - Charlie Munger, close associate of Warren Buffet

Civil servants pick up a wide range of experiences throughout their careers. However, these experiences are not simply “out there”, waiting to be found; they are tied to specific times and places, and interpreted from the civil servant's unique perspective and existing preconceptions. As Charlie Munger says in the above quote, positioning their experiences on mental models will make their particular experiences more useful in decision-making.

A mental model is like a lens (standpoint) through which a civil servant sees the world. Each lens offers a different perspective, revealing new information. Looking through one lens lets the civil servant see one thing, and looking through another reveals something different. Looking through both lenses reveals more than each one individually.

Civil servants do have mental models in mind. However, having only a few at their disposal often leads to overuse of the limited selection, including inappropriate ones, simply because they are readily available.

Here are some examples of mental models.

Mental model #1: Inversion

To eat healthy food, we try to eat what is healthy. It’s much easier to approach the issue from the opposite side and avoid the smaller number of unhealthy foods. What we have done is to invert the question - avoiding the reverse (in this case unhealthy food, instead of eating healthy) helps us achieve the goal of eating more healthily.

Let us apply inversion to beneficiary selection in development programmes, the first step during implementation.

Beneficiary selection starts with listing information needed to determine their eligibility. Some common identifiers can include electricity consumed, two-wheelers owned, and house characteristics. Experience shows that there are several shortcomings with such approaches to determine eligibility.

Applying inversion to beneficiary selection in development programs, we start by assuming all individuals in a category are eligible and then exclude those who are not, which is more efficient than the traditional method of identifying eligibility based on certain criteria.

Mental model # 2: Autocatalysis

Autocatalysis is a process in chemistry that speeds up on its own. Disney had movies whose copyrights they owned. Once the videocassette was invented, they just had to take the tape and transfer it to the cassette. Similarly, Coke prospered with the coming of refrigeration. Autocatalytic effects of videocassettes and refrigeration led to rapid up-scaling of business.

The Jan Dhan, Aadhar, and Mobile phones (JAM) trinity has worked as an autocatalyst to rapidly up-scale direct benefits transfer (DBT) programmes. Simply put, DBT means to directly deposit programme benefits as cash into beneficiary accounts. Earlier schemes allowed cash to be paid directly to beneficiaries, like scholarships. JAM has led to the large-scale roll-out of new DBT programmes, as well as the changeover of existing programmes to DBT.

Mental models allow life’s complexities to be simplified and understandable. Organizing their particular experiences on a network of mental models empowers civil servants to accurately grasp reality and make predictions, thus ensuring better policy design and more effective implementation.

(Another mental model is described in more detail in two articles written by the author in the print versions of The Economic Times and The Mint during 2011-12)