Learn it → Apply it → Save as Skill
Good decisions come from a good process, not just good analysis. WRAP is a four-step decision process, one step for each of the four predictable villains that corrupt important choices: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion and overconfidence.
The Dr. Wallace’s Favorite Mental Models is designed to turn useful ways of thinking into reusable tools. Each model gives you a fast visual overview, deeper interactive learning, practical application exercises and an AI-ready Markdown skill you can save for future use.
Instead of merely reading about mental models, you can gradually build your own AI skills library: a collection of portable reasoning skills that can help ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and other AI assistants apply the mental models you value.
Before a significant, hard-to-reverse decision, run it through four moves: widen the options, reality-test the leading assumption, attain emotional distance, and prepare for being wrong. Each move counters one specific, well-documented decision villain.
Important: WRAP is a discipline applied as a decision unfolds, not a form filled out once and forgotten.
WRAP earns its cost when a decision is significant, somewhat irreversible, and not purely a matter of established expertise.
Each step in WRAP exists to neutralize one specific, well-studied way decisions go wrong.
Counters narrow framing. List more than the one or two choices already on the table, including a "do both for now" option.
Counters confirmation bias. Actively seek evidence that would prove your favorite option wrong, not just evidence that supports it.
Counters short-term emotion. Step outside today's feelings before committing, using a technique like 10/10/10.
Counters overconfidence. Plan for a range of outcomes, not a single confident forecast, and set a tripwire in advance.
Open a use case to see what WRAP changes about how the decision gets made.
Widen the frame: is there a third option, such as a contract-to-hire trial or a different role altogether? Reality-test the assumption that this candidate is the only viable one by asking what evidence would change that view.
Multitrack: pursue a small pilot of both paths, or a partnership, before committing fully to either. Ask how a comparable company solved the same problem.
Apply 10/10/10: how will this choice look in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years? Short-term excitement or pressure is exactly the signal WRAP asks you to step back from.
Reality-test your walk-away price by asking what the other side would have to believe for your current terms to be fair to them too. Prepare to be wrong by setting a range of acceptable outcomes before the conversation starts.
Widen beyond "accept or decline" to include negotiating terms or requesting more time. Attain distance from the flattery of being chosen before deciding what the offer is actually worth to you.
Appoint a genuine skeptic to reality-test the plan rather than a token devil's advocate. Prepare to be wrong by setting a tripwire: a specific signal within 90 days that would trigger a reversal.
This is an illustrative example designed to teach the method, not a record of an actual company.
Expand for the book, the research behind it, and how WRAP relates to specific techniques already in this library.
WRAP comes from Chip Heath and Dan Heath's book Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (2013). The Heaths synthesized decades of behavioral-science findings on judgment and choice into a four-step process built around four recurring "villains" of decision-making.
The Heaths point to research summarized by Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony in "The Case for Behavioral Strategy" (McKinsey Quarterly, 2010), which found that the quality of the decision-making process was a stronger predictor of good outcomes than the quality or depth of the financial analysis behind it. This does not mean analysis is worthless; it means a flawed process can waste good analysis.
They are not competitors. WRAP is the umbrella process; premortems and regret minimization are specific techniques the Heaths recommend plugging into particular steps. A premortem belongs inside "Prepare to Be Wrong." Jeff Bezos's regret minimization question belongs inside "Attain Distance Before Deciding." Use WRAP to decide which tool the moment calls for.
A tripwire is a specific, pre-committed signal set in advance, such as a date, a metric threshold, or a competitor's move, that automatically triggers a planned reconsideration. It exists because people are reliably bad at noticing in the moment that a decision has quietly stopped working.
WRAP is a discipline applied as a decision evolves, not a form filled out once at the start and ignored afterward.
Listing a token extra option, then quietly returning to the original two choices, defeats the purpose of the step.
Appointing a dissenter can backfire if it makes everyone else feel the critical thinking has already been outsourced.
The exercise only works if the 10-month and 10-year views are allowed to actually outvote the 10-minute feeling.
The more obviously correct an option feels, the more overconfidence is likely already at work.
Running all four steps on a cheap, reversible decision wastes time and can look like indecision rather than rigor.
the decision is cheap, low-stakes, or easily reversed. The cost of a full WRAP pass can exceed the cost of a wrong answer.
there is a genuine, time-critical emergency with no real room to widen options or reality-test assumptions before acting.
you have deep, fast-feedback expertise in the exact domain, where recognition-based judgment has repeatedly proven reliable.
This browser tool structures your thinking. It does not send your information anywhere or perform AI analysis.
Save as Skill converts the model into portable Markdown instructions that teach an AI when and how to apply the WRAP framework, what questions to ask, what evidence to seek, what mistakes to avoid and how to structure its analysis.
Save the skills you find useful and organize them into your own reusable library. The Markdown is intentionally model-neutral, so it can be used wherever an AI system accepts uploaded files, project knowledge, custom instructions or reusable text context. Platform capabilities differ, so this is a portable skill file rather than a claim of one-click installation.
No. WRAP improves the odds of a good decision by structuring the process; it cannot guarantee a good outcome, since even well-made decisions can fail for reasons outside anyone's control. The framework is judged by the quality of the process, not retroactively by whether the outcome happened to work out.
No. Six Thinking Hats structures a group discussion by assigning different thinking modes to different participants. The Cynefin Framework first classifies the type of problem (simple, complicated, complex or chaotic) before choosing an approach. WRAP assumes you already know you are facing a significant, somewhat irreversible personal or organizational decision, and gives you a four-step sequence for making it well.
That is a legitimate and useful outcome. If every alternative collapses back to one clearly dominant option once you have genuinely widened the frame and reality-tested it, WRAP has still done its job: it has turned an assumption into a tested conclusion.