Philosophy

Most “thinking tools” collections grow by collecting brands. This one is built on a different bet: the value is in the cognitive move, the evidence behind it is uneven, and a reader is better served by knowing which is which than by a uniform veneer of confidence. Three ideas follow from that.

Mechanism over ritual

Each skill implements a durable cognitive move and is named for what the move does, not for the trademark wrapped around it. Parallel Perspectives Review is the move of examining a decision through separated lenses; Six Thinking Hats is one branded ritual on top of it. Authentic Dissent is the move of engineering genuine minority disagreement; the role-played Devil’s Advocacy version is a weaker ritual of the same intent.

The branded method is lineage, not the headline. Naming the mechanism keeps the catalog small enough to choose from, lets one move absorb its near-duplicates instead of spawning a card per brand, and makes the evidence question answerable: you grade a mechanism, not a logo.

The four commitments

Every skill here meets four authoring commitments before it ships:

1. Mechanism over ritual - implement the durable cognitive move, named descriptively, not a brand.
2. Honest evidence grading - carry an evidence tier and a dossier that states what the research does and does NOT support, and flag evidence transferred from human studies rather than AI-validated. No laundered statistics.
3. Artifact, not prose - emit a named, structured, reusable artifact: a risk register, an option matrix, an assumption ledger, an argument map.
4. Explicit “When NOT to Use” - state where the method misleads, to guard against cargo-cult execution.

The second commitment carries an honest-grading promise: a skill is allowed to be practitioner-tier and say so. “P, useful anyway, here is when not to use it” is more trustworthy than a dressed-up “S”.

Honest grading is the product

That promise is not a disclaimer in the footer; it is the thing the library sells. The field is a small empirical core surrounded by a large practitioner ring. We keep them visibly separate instead of flattening them.

The empirical core is the anchor: the strong-evidence skills include Brainwriting, Reference Class Forecasting, Argument Mapping, WOOP, and Natural-Frequency Bayesian Framing, among others. The honestly-labeled practitioner methods sit around it, each worth running when its move fits your problem.

For what the S/M/P/V/A/C/X tiers mean and how a grade is assigned, see The evidence model. It is the one place the tiers are defined; this page does not repeat it.