In our last video, we introduced the fact that mental models has other side. Let me remark on this dark side because this is truly relevant in order to understand how useful a cognitive diversity could be in teams and organizations. There is a wonderful example to solve how powerful mental models could be in terms of make sense of our world and introduce certain constraint about our understanding of it. Let me introduce Roger Bannister. Roger Bannister was the first person to be able to run one mile below at classical limit, four minutes, and the interesting thing about Roger Bannister is, when we are able to see basically all the historical records we can see is truly interesting phenomenon. This phenomenon is that basically for an entire decade, all the runners tried to break this mental limit, four minutes. No one was able to break it, why? Maybe the reason has to be related with basically the technique that they are using, maybe could be related with materials, maybe could be related with the way in which they are able to run. Well, Roger Bannister was able to break this record using a very different approach. Roger Bannister was able to notice that the main constraint, the mental limitation, was not a physical one, was a mental one. Basically, the mental model that was shared by most of the runner, by most of the athletes was that basically this record was absolutely unbreakable, there was a physical limit, a glass ceiling that couldn't be broken. Roger Bannister noticed that the only way to overcome this limiting belief was basically facing, transforming, changing his own mental model, and the interesting thing was the way in which he did it, he did it step-by-step. Roger Bannister started his training process in a very interesting way, in order to destroy this limiting belief, they decided to break it step-by-step. First, running a quarter mile under one minute, then running half a mile below two minutes. In this way, he was able to overcome, basically this limiting belief. He was able to destroy the mental model that was producing such undesirable effect on his behavior and his performance. Well, the relevance of mental models basically is this, is a strange combination of providers are as truly useful tool in order to make decisions and to make sense of our world in a very fast way, but at the same time, introducing a limiting belief. Basically, cognitive diversity in simple terms, is a tool to be able to take advantage of the good side of mental models and to be able to remove all the limitations, all the constraints related with the dark side of mental models. Well, in fact, there is quite a famous quote by Albert Einstein related with that, basically is impossible to solve a problem, basically using the same mental model that has created such problem, and the outcome of this process is truly interesting. Now, here you can see Roger Bannister basically 50 years later, well, the quizzes, there are questions that I would like to post is, how do you see in that the one mile record has been evolving during the last decade? Well, thanks to Roger Bannister, basically this limiting belief was removed, and more interestingly, no other limiting belief emerged in this field of sport practice. Roger Bannister was not able only to destroy a specific mental model, was able to destroy a limiting belief that could be, in the worst scenario, could be enjoying a revival in later years. In this case, the Roger Bannister example provide a wonderful example about how we can build with the dark side of mental models.
