Until the Vulcan Mind Meld . . . Building Shared Mental Models
by Charlotte Roberts

from Leverage Points July 2011

Copyright © 2011 Pegasus Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

In the popular science fiction TV series Star Trek, an extraterrestrial species known as Vulcans possess a unique characteristic: They can wordlessly share thoughts, experiences, memories, and knowledge with others through a technique called a “mind meld.” Unfortunately, we real-life humans don’t share this trait. Not only do we struggle to communicate our thinking to others, we often act without being aware of the assumptions that shape our understanding of the world.

Mental models, the pictures or maps we have in our minds that we employ when interpreting, judging, and deciding, are one of the five disciplines of a learning culture. Our mental models control our actions, and yet we tend to be unaware of the specifics embedded within them. Most of us have not been trained in reflective learning to test our own thinking and understand its impact on ourselves and others.

As a result, when confronted by opinions that conflict with our own, we generally defend our thinking or feign interest in someone else’s mindset rather than submit to the subtle and deep work of testing our own mental models. We rely on and are often rewarded for the repertoire of responses we have developed to familiar stimuli in our environment. We look for the right answer to solve the problem or question, based on our past experience. If well practiced, we can be on automatic pilot and push our way through a workweek of data, expectations, and requests from others without examining or questioning our underlying assumptions.

The situation gets messier the more people are involved. Groups hold mental models about their relationships and actions. As we join a team, organization, club, or society, we may have a mentor who guides us through the norms for that group, for example, the proper way to assert oneself and to disagree, the distribution of power and status, the type of data that the team values, the role of money, ground rules, etc. Often the subtleties and undiscussables are left for us to discover as we inadvertently bump into them in the course of our work. In the process of trying to dive into the thinking behind people’s actions, we may end up putting them on the defensive, whether we intend to or not.

Add one more layer of complexity by focusing on a group with fiduciary responsibility for an organization in perpetuity. A board of directors or trustees must work together to govern an organization in all its complexity and ensure the public that best decisions are being made on behalf of all stakeholders. Many boards meet in person four to six times a year, with committee meetings in between, either in person or through conference calls. Members begin to build familiarity by observing each others’ behaviors (he talks too much, she asks good questions, she demands data, he rushes to decide, etc.), but they seldom get to know each others’ mental models about the institution, governing, the role of senior leadership, group decision making, and so on. To be an effective board, members need to know a lot about how other members think. And they need to carve out time for defining their prevailing governance model.

Building shared mental models while taking advantage of the diversity of thinking in a group requires the disciplined deployment of time and talent. If we were better at reflective learning, we could draw out each person’s key assumptions and beliefs. In the absence of such facility, one method to promote deep conversation, model building, and coordinated action is to display a continuum of possible models.

There are numerous ways to organize options about a given situation, and each has a distinct impact on the members, organization, and future. Start by doing the research and designing a continuum of positions on an issue. It’s not about having the perfect representation or right answers; the goal is to stimulate the group’s thinking so members can arrive at a shared mental model about a critical issue.

Charlotte Roberts, PhD, is co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization and The Dance of Change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. She will be a keynote speaker at the 2011 Systems Thinking in Action Conference.

A more extensive version of this article will appear in the August 2011 issue of The Systems Thinker newsletter. To read more, subscribe here.