In business, people often assume that better outcomes come from better decisions. Better strategy. Better thinking. Better tools. When progress stalls or results disappoint, the instinct is to optimise execution, acquire new techniques, or push harder.
This article takes a different approach.
Rather than starting with what people do, it looks at how situations appear to them in the first place. It explores why two entrepreneurs can face the same market conditions, the same information, and the same constraints, yet experience entirely different realities and move in opposite directions with equal confidence.
The argument is not that logic or strategy is unimportant. It is that they arrive later than we think. Long before conscious reasoning begins, interpretation has already shaped what feels possible, what feels risky, and what feels necessary. By the time action is taken, the path has often already narrowed.
Understanding this is especially critical in entrepreneurship, where uncertainty is constant, feedback is ambiguous, and pressure is high. But the same structures operate in everyday life. How people interpret relationships, responsibility, opportunity, and failure follows the same underlying pattern.
Most decisions are not made through reasoning. They are made through interpretation. A situation registers, meaning forms, and action follows. Explanation arrives later, often mistaken for cause. This is not a failure of intelligence or discipline. It is the structure of how human beings engage the world.
People do not encounter reality directly. They encounter an organised version of it. What stands out as relevant, what fades into the background, what feels urgent, and what feels negligible is already determined before deliberate thought begins. This is why effort so often fails to correct outcomes. Effort amplifies whatever way of seeing is already in place.
Interpretation before logic
Two people can face the same conditions, the same constraints, and the same information, yet move in opposite directions. One experiences opportunity while the other experiences threat. One advances while the other withdraws. Nothing external has changed. The difference sits in how the situation appears.
Meaning forms before analysis. Action begins before certainty. Logic then follows, recruited to justify what has already started. From the inside, this sequence feels clean and rational. From the outside, it can appear inconsistent or misaligned. Both perspectives are coherent within their own frame.
This order of operations is rarely questioned because it is rarely visible. Interpretation settles early and quietly. By the time reasoning engages, the path has already narrowed.
Mental models as stabilised interpretation
Within this process sit mental models. They are not theories or tools. They are stabilised explanations of how systems behave and what outcomes to expect. They compress complexity into expectation and make action possible.
This is not a speculative idea. There is extensive research showing that humans do not reason from abstract rules first, but from internal representations of how a situation is structured. In experimental work on human reasoning, participants consistently draw conclusions from the mental models they construct of a problem, even when those models lead to confidently incorrect answers. Errors arise not from carelessness but from the structure of the model itself.
Mental models answer questions such as what kind of situation this is and what someone like me does here. They operate continuously, often invisibly.
When resistance appears, one model reads negotiation, another reads threat, and another reads signal. When growth slows, one model reads market feedback, another reads personal failure, and another reads timing. The event remains the same. The meaning does not.
When outcomes disappoint, behaviour is adjusted. Strategy is refined. Tools are replaced. The structure that made those interpretations feel necessary is rarely examined.
Why mental models are not enough
Learning about mental models can be clarifying. It offers language for why certain choices feel obvious and others feel unavailable.
But mental models are not foundational. They are one layer within a deeper structure of sense making.
This aligns with findings from cognitive psychology and behavioural research. Studies of judgement under uncertainty show that people routinely rely on fast, automatic interpretations rather than deliberate reasoning, particularly when stakes are unclear or time is constrained. What feels like a considered decision is often the output of an already formed frame.
This is why changing a mental model sometimes produces movement and sometimes does not. A new explanation is inserted, but the conditions that make certain explanations feel credible remain unchanged. The surrounding structure continues to shape what can be seen, prioritised, or dismissed.
The limitation is not the model itself. It is where the model sits.
Metacontent
Beneath mental models sits a deeper interpretive architecture. Metacontent refers to the intellectual substrate that underlies human sense making. It is not the content of reality, such as facts, events, or information, but the structure that determines how that content is perceived, organised, filtered, prioritised, and given meaning.
In the body of work developed by Ashkan Tashvir, Metacontent functions as the background operating system of human thought. It operates upstream of action, emotion, and belief, shaping how individuals and societies interpret the world before conscious reasoning begins. Metacontent is not something people consciously adopt. They live inside it.
The Nested Theory of Sense Making
Metacontent is not a single layer. It is a nested architecture of interpretation. Distortion or rigidity at higher levels propagates downward, constraining the quality of understanding and decision making that follows.
This architecture can be described through the following layers.
Initial Insight, the abductive given, refers to the immediate, pre-reflective impression where something registers as significant, threatening, or urgent before conscious thought engages.
Cognitive Maps are the internal reference structures that classify what things are and how they relate to one another.
Narratives and Stories are the meanings constructed to organise experience, link interpretation to identity, and compress complexity into coherent explanation.
Mental Models are crystallised assumptions about how systems function and what outcomes to expect, often operating as automated procedures for handling situations.
Perspectives reflect the vantage point shaped by experience, position, and proximity to consequence, determining what is foregrounded or ignored.
Domains refer to the field of reality within which an issue is placed, such as business, law, family, or politics, each carrying its own norms and constraints.
Paradigms are the deepest organising logics governing what counts as valid knowledge, legitimate action, or reality itself.
This entire structure rests within Context, which is not a layer but the underlying field. Stress, historical pressure, cultural narratives, trauma, and urgency activate, modulate, or distort how these layers function.
From perception to outcome
Metacontent governs the progression from perception to outcome. Sense making produces meaning. Meaning generates intention. Intention gives rise to conduct and action.
When distortion exists upstream, it propagates. Effort increases. Activity intensifies. Outcomes remain coherent internally and misaligned externally.
This is why people can act with conviction while producing results that do not hold. From the inside, behaviour feels justified. From the outside, it appears misguided. Both are generated by the same interpretive structure.
Individual and collective consequence
Metacontent exists at both individual and collective levels. Individually, it includes inherited lenses, emotional histories, and embedded narratives that shape personal judgement and reaction.
Collectively, societies operate within shared Metacontent. Shared assumptions about what is good, what is true, and what is right shape institutions, leadership, and policy. These structures feel neutral to those inside them and obvious only in hindsight.
When collective Metacontent is distorted, systems remain internally coherent while producing outcomes that erode trust, alignment, and integrity.
Where responsibility shifts
Most attempts at change focus on action. Some attend to thinking. Very few attend to the interpretive architecture that makes certain thoughts and actions feel necessary in the first place.
When attention moves to Metacontent, responsibility shifts. Not toward optimisation or control, but toward authorship.
The question is no longer how to decide better. It is how reality is being rendered. That question does not resolve neatly. It withdraws an assumption instead.
References
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Tashvir, A. (2024). Metacontent: The Intellectual Substrates for Sense Making.