Modelos mentais e mudança

Gosto muito da metáfora do iceberg (de Peter Senge), para ilustrar o encadeamento de uma série de factores que explicam o que vem à tona nos relatórios periódicos das organizações.

Os resultados esporádicos podem ser colocados num gráfico que ilustre a evolução temporal e retrate um padrão de comportamento.

Os padrões de comportamento resultam de estruturas sistémicas, redes entrelaçadas de relações de causa-efeito.
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Essas estruturas sistémicas, por sua vez, resultam de modelos mentais que transportamos, muitas vezes de forma inconsciente, e que influenciam a nossa forma de pensar e actuar.
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Encontrei no livro "Creative Destruction - Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them" de Richard Foster e Sarah Kaplan uma boa descrição do que são esses modelos mentais, por que são precisos e por que são perigosos.
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São estes mesmos modelos mentais que explicam por que é tão difícil mudar as organizações, por que é tantas empresas não vêem, não presssentem a chegada do futuro e permanecem demasiado tempo agarradas a modelos de negócio que passaram o seu prazo de validade.
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“Cultural lock-in” – the inability to change the corporate culture even in the face of clear market threats – explains why corporations find it difficult to respond to the messages of the marketplace. Cultural lock-in results from the gradual stiffening of the invisible architecture of the corporation, and the ossification of its decision-making abilities, control systems, and mental models. It dampens a company’s ability to innovate or to shed operations with a less-exciting future. Moreover, it signals the corporation’s inexorable decline into inferior performance.”
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“The heart of the problem is the formation of hidden sets of rules, or mental models, that once formed are extremely difficult to change. Mental models are the core concepts of the corporation, the beliefs and assumptions, the cause-and-effect relationships, the guidelines for interpreting language and signals, the stories repeated within the corporate walls.”
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““… mental models the “theoretical frameworks that help investors better understand the world.”
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"Mental models are invisible in the corporation. They are neither explicit nor examined, but they are pervasive. When well crafted, mental models allow management to anticipate the future and solve problems. But once constructed, mental models become self-reinforcing, self-sustaining, and self-limiting. And when mental models are out of sync with reality, they cause management to make forecasting errors and poor decisions. The assumption of continuity, in fact, is precisely the kind of disconnect with reality that leads corporations into flawed forecasting and poor decisions.”