Useful Fictions
George Box, the statistician, wrote: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The map is never the territory. The question is whether the map helps you navigate.
“Treat focus like a battery” — it depletes with use, recharges with rest. This is physiologically wrong. The brain has no focus reservoir that drains. But the fiction produces useful behavior: scheduling deep work in 90-minute blocks, taking 20-minute breaks, protecting mornings for hard problems.
The mechanism doesn’t matter. The behavior does.
Teams talk about “technical debt” like credit cards. “We’re paying interest on that auth system.” “That’s going to bankrupt us in Q3.” Code doesn’t actually compound like money — there’s no 18% APR on a messy module.
But the metaphor gives engineers and product managers a shared vocabulary. The PM understands the tradeoff without a 20-minute explanation of coupling and cohesion.
Other useful fictions that appear in daily work:
- Writer’s block as constipation. Something is stuck; movement fixes it. Not accurate, but produces the response of writing anything to get flowing.
- Meetings as transaction costs. Each one has overhead. Worth tracking, like expenses.
- Ideas as sex. They reproduce when they meet. Keep them circulating.
The trick is holding fictions loosely. Swap them when the terrain changes. A model that helped last year might mislead this year. The utility is contextual.