Day 3: The Missing Mental Model at Most Companies

What most companies lack is a shared mental model for connection.

Without it, innovation is not optimized.

Imagine this.

A leadership meeting is going well. The deck is tight. The milestones are green. The narrative holds.

Near the end, you decide to speak up.

You say, “I’m noticing I feel uneasy about how confident we sound. Not because the plan is wrong — but because we’re assuming adoption will look like last time. I can’t prove it yet, but something feels off.”

The C-Suite tightens. The CEO says, “Let’s stay focused on the plan.” The meeting moves on.

Three months later, the project underperforms for exactly the reason that you named. By then, it’s framed as an execution failure. Or market conditions. Or bad luck.

What actually happened is simpler: The leaders didn’t have a mental model for connection.

Connection Is a Mental Model

When people talk about connection at work, it often gets reduced to tone, likability, or emotional intelligence.

That’s not what I mean.

Connection is the ability to see relationships — between people, between ideas, between assumptions — and to notice how those relationships shape what a group is able to think together.

Innovation is rarely about a single idea.

It’s about connecting ideas that don’t obviously belong together and staying with that tension long enough for something new to emerge.

That’s what was missing in the meeting.

Connection Is Learnable

Because connection is a mental model, it can be learned.

The common traps are scripts, traits, and schmoozing. Those focus on behavior without changing how people relate to connecting.

Some people enter connection through a mindset shift. Others through concepts. Some through strategy. Others through skills or tactics. All of these are valid entry points. They all work inside the mental model of connection.

What’s Next

In the age of AI, answers are abundant and synthesis is easy.

What doesn’t scale is the human capacity to stay in relationship while ideas are still forming.

Innovation comes from Level 3 conversations. And Level 3 conversations require connection as a mental model.

AI can compute patterns. But it can’t hold context the way humans do: the lived history, emotional residue, and shared meaning that accumulates over years of working together.

Tomorrow, we move into Disconnect, starting with the first move: questioning the assumptions you’re currently operating from.