Sarah Vela – consultant for social media, content development, and strategy

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog.

While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models  to better understand your own path.

- Sarah

(This interview is cross-posted from the Austin Social Media Club website, where it originally appeared.)

About Bijoy:

Bijoy Goswami was born in Bangalore, India on April 15, 1973, to a Catholic mother and a Hindu father. They moved to Taiwan when he was ten, and Hong Kong when he was fourteen. He came to the U.S. in 1991 to attend Stanford, where he studied Computer Science, Economics, History and inter-disciplinary honors in Science, Technology and Society. He moved to Austin in 1995 to join a software startup. In April, 2000 he co-founded a software company with his friend Bruce Krysiak. In 2003 he began his true work as a model-builder and evangelist.

Bijoy, thanks so much for coming to speak with me today.

Absolutely, thank you.

I have a lot of questions for you. I would love to start off just by talking about mental models and what that means. What are mental models?

Mental models are something we do as humans so much, that we don’t really realize we do it. The problem is that mental models inform everything we do. If you think about any activity that you might do as a human being, there’s a mental model underneath it. Many folks have pointed the importance of mental models: Jean Piaget in education and Peter Senge in business, to name a few. Wikipedia has a nice entry. Whether it’s being a parent, or starting a business, or having a relationship, there’s a mental model that you have about that issue, or that person, activity or or that entity.

I look at the process by which we come up with mental models: how do we articulate those mental models to each other and communicate them, and then where does it go wrong. For example, prejudice is basically a grooved-in mental model that has an incorrect view of reality. As humans we’re constantly trying to make a model of reality through our brain that mediates everything that we do. To me, having better models is what we’re about, to some extent. But because it’s so natural and so ingrained, we don’t think about the fact that this is what we’re doing. My deal is to get people to build really good mental models for themselves, and to help them expose their own thought processes to themselves and others.

Give me an example of a mental model that you’ve created for yourself, and how did it help you?

The easiest one to start with is Maven, Relater, Evangelist: MRE. Meals ready to eat (laughs). That model, number one, says that we’re all different. So it takes the Golden Rule and turns it on its head. Yes, we’re all human, but people have different energies and different locations on this triangle of energy: Maven, Relater, Evangelist. And where you’re situated on that triangle influences your personality, the way you communicate, the way you relate, and so on and so forth. It’s interesting because whenever I present the model to people they say, “But aren’t I all three? I want to be all three!” People have a desire or built-in model that they should be all three, they should be good at all things, whatever those things are. The model is saying people have these different energies. We all do these activities. Just because the maven is living in thought space doesn’t mean they take no actions. But it’s the way that they take action that is important.

So, a model for people could be, “We’re all the same,” which is the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule pops out of a model that says people are all the same. And then you’ve got personality models all along the spectrum. If you march up the hill from one: “We’re all the same,” the most common mental model we use for “We’re different” is men and women. We break up into two categories. Men are this way, women are that way. Clearly that’s a fairly useful model, but it starts running out of steam pretty quickly, especially if you’re trying to talk about our talents, our passions, and what we’re doing. MRE is number three, it has three elements to it. Models like DISC have four. Enneagram has nine. And 16, Myers-Briggs, which is kind of the Microsoft, or the Google, of those (as in the 800 pound gorilla).

Again, the starting point is “Wait a second, people are not the same?” And “Oh yeah, I guess I see the world a certain way and I don’t think about it.” So number one is I’ve got to know myself. Because knowing yourself means you discover what you’re good at and, perhaps more importantly, you discover what you’re not good at.

So did creating that model help you to know where you fell in the model? Or did you already know.

I didn’t know. And I didn’t know the implications of it. Working on the model has helped me work out a number of things within and without myself. So, one of the big implications externally is that you seek out partners. Whatever activity you’re doing, you seek out what I call a “dance partner.” I had been inadvertently finding dance partners in my life, but I hadn’t realized the natural implication of this fact. I had inadvertently been developing what I call my Evangelist/Maven. So on this triangle I’m an Evangelist/Maven, I’m dominated by Evangelist energy, but my minor is Maven. And until then I didn’t have a vocabulary for it. But it’s interesting, back in high school I won the leadership and the academic award…

Uh huh. So there you go.

There you go. It was already there, but no one said “Wow, you’re a great Evangelist, go work on that.” I would take all these leadership roles, I would give lots of talks, do theater, those are all evangelist type of activities. Yet I was very studious. When I compare the two energies, really my Evangelist is my strong one. But not having the awareness that that was going on (a model), I was just good at a lot of things.

It meant that I essentially spent a lot of time exploring avenues that weren’t necessarily useful to explore. And if I knew that, I’d probably be more efficient about the way I went about it. So once I had a model for it, I could place myself in the model and realize I’m not supposed to do everything.

This is Part I of a four-part series. Here’s Part II.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Paintings by Tina Schweiger.