I’m a fan of the hard labor that goes into attempting to parse out the structure of the world. Even more so I love a big complex model that results from that work. I like to collect them.

For example here’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

• Self Actualization
• The Esteem of one’s peers.
• Love
• Safety
• Physiological – food, air, warmth

The theory goes that your need for the ones low on the list will trump your seeking the ones high on the list. E.g. if your starving, then you don’t seek safety.

I like having a big bag of these to help bust out of the trap any one of them creates when thinking about a problem.

I’ve probably got about a hundred of these rattling around in my head, maybe a few hundred. For example here’s the top few means to manipulate or influence others:

• Recoprocity
• Commitment
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity

These very brief version of these frameworks can’t due them justice. You really have to pick them apart. Think about them for a few months – each!

One of my “issues” is that I tend to rapidly toggle from one of these to another, maybe it’s an attention problem. Often when working on a problem with others I project their statements into one of these, and then page in an alternate model and inject it into the discussion. Sadly this confuses people.

These are all analogous to Christopher Alexander’s Design Patterns. They are different too. His patterns fit on a page. These tend to fit in a book, a career, a movement, a religion – bigger things. That’s what makes them so interesting.

I guess I should remind myself at this point that that gluttony is a sin.