Open-source thinking-framework skills that make rigorous reasoning executable for AI agents.
237 composable mental models — packaged as installable Agent Skills. Each turns a reasoning method that usually lives in a book into a step-by-step process an AI agent can actually run, with worked historical examples and cited sources.
Add all 237 skills:
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skillsList what's inside, or grab a single skill:
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --list
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill first-principlesEach folder is also a self-contained SKILL.md with examples/ and references/ — copy it into your agent's skills directory directly if you prefer.
Useful? Star this repo — stars are how other agent builders find it.
| Skill | Live | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 10 10 10 | ↗ | Faced with a non-trivial decision, ask three questions: How will I feel in 10 minutes? In 10 months? In 10 years? The three horizons are spaced an order of magnitude apart to surfa |
| Aarrr Pirate Metrics | ↗ | A startup's growth is a sequential funnel — each stage gates the next. |
| Abductive Reasoning | ↗ | Abduction — inference to the best explanation — is the only mode of reasoning that introduces new ideas. |
| Activation Onboarding Playbook | ↗ | Activation is the moment a new user first experiences real value — the "aha moment" — and the single biggest lever on retention and revenue for most products/services. |
| Anchoring | ↗ | When people estimate an unknown quantity they start from a reference point — an anchor — and adjust. |
| Ansoff Matrix | ↗ | Every growth option a firm has falls into one of four quadrants defined by two axes: existing vs. |
| Antifragile | ↗ | Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012) identified a third response to stress beyond fragile/robust: antifragile — systems that gain from disorder, with bounded downside and unbounded upside. |
| Ar Dso Discipline | ↗ | Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is the average time to collect after a sale. |
| Arrow Information Paradox | ↗ | You have something valuable to sell — a technology, a formula, a method, a dataset, a research result. |
| Authority Bias | ↗ | Authority bias is the automatic tendency to comply with directives from authority figures — often overriding one's own judgment, ethics, or evidence. |
| Availability Heuristic | ↗ | The availability heuristic: people estimate probability by how easily examples come to mind. |
| Batna Zopa | ↗ | BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) is the value of your best fallback if no deal happens — the floor below which you walk away. |
| Bayesian Reasoning | ↗ | Bayes' theorem: Posterior odds = Prior odds × Likelihood ratio. |
| Bcg Matrix | ↗ | Maps each business unit on a 2×2 grid of market growth rate vs. |
| Black Swan | ↗ | Taleb (2007): a black swan is (1) outside all prior expectations, (2) extreme impact, (3) obvious in hindsight only. |
| Blue Ocean Strategy | ↗ | Most competitive strategy assumes industry boundaries are fixed. |
| Bootstrapping Vs Raising | ↗ | Raising venture capital is not a milestone; it's a choice that commits you to a specific outcome — a large, fast, high-multiple exit — because that's the only outcome that pays bac |
| Bullseye Traction Channels | ↗ | From Traction (Weinberg & Mares, 2014): most startups die from lack of distribution, not product, and they fail because they over-invest in one favored channel instead of systemati |
| Business Model Canvas | ↗ | A business creates, delivers, and captures value through nine interlocking blocks (Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Res |
| Cash Conversion Cycle | ↗ | The cash conversion cycle (CCC) measures how long cash is trapped between paying suppliers and collecting from customers: CCC = DIO (days inventory) + DSO (days receivables) − DPO |
| Change And Constants | ↗ | Every strategy contains elements that must change and elements that must not. |
| Checklist | ↗ | A checklist is a short written list of must-not-skip steps for a complex repeated operation. |
| Chestertons Fence | ↗ | Before removing a rule, process, code path, or institution — you must understand why it was put there. |
| Circle Of Competence | ↗ | Every decision-maker has a domain where judgments are reliable (inside the circle) and one where they are not (outside). |
| Cognitive Evolution Stages | ↗ | Most learning models treat acquisition as the final destination. |
| Cognitive Load Theory | ↗ | Working memory holds ~4 chunks of novel information — a hard limit. |
| Cognitive Science Landscape | ↗ | Eight interconnected domains constitute human cognition: (1) Perception & Attention, (2) Memory, (3) Language & Thought, (4) Decision Making & Judgment, (5) Metacognition, (6) Emot |
| Commitment Consistency | ↗ | Small commitments today dramatically raise the probability of large commitments tomorrow — people have a strong drive to behave consistently with prior choices, especially ones tha |
| Comparative Advantage | ↗ | Mutually beneficial specialization depends on relative productivity, not absolute. |
| Compound Interest | ↗ | Compound interest: a quantity grows at a rate proportional to its current size — growth itself grows — producing exponential accumulation. |
| Confirmation Bias | ↗ | Confirmation bias is the systematic tendency to seek, interpret, remember, and weight evidence in ways that support existing beliefs — and to correspondingly miss disconfirming evi |
| Content Led Growth | ↗ | Content-led growth turns a website into a compounding acquisition asset by covering the topics your buyers search, organized as pillar + cluster pages that build topical authority. |
| Continuous Discovery | ↗ | Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021) replaces one-off research with a weekly cadence of customer touchpoints by the team building the product, st |
| Contrarian Question | ↗ | Peter Thiel opens Zero to One (2014) with an interview question he says he asks constantly: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" Its business translation as |
| CPA Doc Chase | ↗ | |
| CPA Form Finder | ↗ | |
| CPA IRS Representation | ↗ | |
| CPA Return Review | ↗ | |
| Critical Thinking | ↗ | Critical thinking evaluates a conclusion by explicitly testing it against alternative interpretations — the conclusion that survives the most disconfirmation attempts is the one to |
| Cross Disciplinary Creativity | ↗ | Importing an actual mechanism from a foreign domain and applying it structurally to a home-domain problem — producing a configuration no expert in either field could conceive alone |
| Curiosity Learning Curve | ↗ | Biological learning capacity remains measurable into the 70s and 80s. |
| Customer Relationship Ladder | ↗ | Most B2B teams treat relationship deepening as an attitude problem — be friendlier, schedule more QBRs. |
| Customs Adcvd Tariff Exposure | ↗ | |
| Customs Duty Optimization Opportunity Cost | ↗ | |
| Customs Hts Classification Mece | ↗ | |
| Customs Origin Usmca Decision | ↗ | |
| Customs Reasonable Care Isf Checklist | ↗ | |
| Cynefin | ↗ | Cynefin (pronounced "kuh-NEV-in"; Welsh for "habitat") is a sense-making framework by Dave Snowden (IBM, 1999). |
| Death Spiral | ↗ | A death spiral is a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop in competitive markets. |
| Decision Tree | ↗ | A decision tree maps a multi-stage decision: decision nodes (squares) for choices you control, chance nodes (circles) for outcomes you don't, probabilities on every branch, payoffs |
| Deep Work | ↗ | Cal Newport's framework (2016): deep work = undistracted, cognitively demanding activity that creates hard-to-replicate value; shallow work = logistical, responsive, easy-to-replic |
| Definite Optimism | ↗ | In Zero to One (2014, ch. |
| Deliberate Practice | ↗ | Most people confuse repetition with learning — they accumulate years of experience and plateau. |
| Demand Leadership | ↗ | The highest-value market position is not to fulfill demand but to define it — to become the entity whose framing of the problem the customer adopts as their own. |
| Design Thinking | ↗ | Design thinking — formalized by Tim Brown at IDEO and Stanford's d.school, grounded in Simon (1969) and Rittel's "wicked problems" — replaces assumption-driven decisions with evide |
| Dichotomy Of Control | ↗ | Separate what is within your power (judgments, intentions, voluntary actions) from what is not (outcomes, others' actions, external events) — then direct effort to the first and ac |
| Discovery Call Spin | ↗ | SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham, from large-sale research) structures a discovery call around four question types in order — Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff — so the buyer |
| Disruptive Innovation | ↗ | Most incumbents fail not because they make bad decisions, but because they make good ones. |
| Do Things That Dont Scale | ↗ | Paul Graham's counterintuitive rule: early on, the unscalable is exactly what you should do. |
| Door In The Face | ↗ | Ask for something large (expect refusal), then retreat to the smaller request you actually wanted. |
| Dual System Thinking | ↗ | Two parallel modes: System 1 — fast, automatic, effortless (pattern recognition, gut feel). |
| Dunbars Number | ↗ | Dunbar's number (~150) is the cognitive limit on stable social groups the human neocortex can sustain, with nested layers at ~5, ~15, ~50, then outer bands at ~500 and ~1,500. |
| Dunning Kruger | ↗ | The Dunning-Kruger effect is the systematic self-assessment asymmetry demonstrated by Kruger & Dunning (1999): bottom-quartile performers overestimate rank by ~50 percentile points |
| Dynamic Core Competence | ↗ | Core competence (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) becomes dynamic when you recognize that competences decay, markets change what they reward, and building sequence matters. |
| Economic Moat | ↗ | An economic moat is the durable, structural competitive advantage that protects a business's returns on capital from being competed away. |
| Economies Of Scale | ↗ | Average cost per unit falls as output rises — fixed costs spread thinner, specialization deepens, and learning compounds. |
| Emergence | ↗ | Emergence: many interacting parts produce whole-level properties that cannot be predicted from the parts alone. |
| Endowment Effect | ↗ | People demand roughly 2× more to give up something they own than they would pay to acquire the identical thing — purely because they own it. |
| Estimated Tax Safety Buffer | ↗ | |
| Expected Value And Kelly | ↗ | Two questions decide most repeated bets: is this bet good? (EV) and how big? (Kelly). |
| Falsifiability | ↗ | A meaningful empirical claim must specify what observations would refute it. |
| Feedback Loops | ↗ | A system has a feedback loop when its output circles back as input to the next cycle. |
| Feynman Technique | ↗ | The Feynman Technique tests whether understanding is genuine (can reproduce, predict, extend) or surface (can recognize, recall jargon). |
| First Mover Advantage | ↗ | Lieberman and Montgomery's 1988 landmark paper established both the mechanisms of first-mover advantage and, with equal rigor, the mechanisms of first-mover disadvantage that make |
| First Principles | ↗ | Most reasoning is reasoning by analogy: X resembles Y, so do what Y does. |
| Founder Burnout Sustainability | ↗ | In a small company the founder is the critical infrastructure: when their energy, health, or judgment fails, the company fails. |
| Founder Led Sales | ↗ | Before product-market fit, the founder must run sales personally — not because it scales, but because it's the fastest, highest-fidelity discovery loop and the only way to learn wh |
| Founder Mindset | ↗ | A specific cognitive mode for running an early-stage company — different from manager mindset (optimizing known systems) and employee mindset (executing within fixed scope). |
| Founder Trajectory Matrix | ↗ | Founders diverge along two behavioral axes: (1) actively seeking mentors vs. |
| Framing Effect | ↗ | The framing effect: logically equivalent descriptions of the same decision produce different choices depending on whether outcomes are cast as gains or losses. |
| Freight Carrier Vetting Checklist | ↗ | |
| Freight Double Brokering Exposure | ↗ | |
| Freight Lane Pricing Decision | ↗ | |
| Freight Shipper Carrier Principal Agent | ↗ | |
| Fundamental Attribution Error | ↗ | The fundamental attribution error (FAE) is the systematic tendency to over-weight character factors and under-weight situational factors when explaining others' behavior — while re |
| Goodharts Law | ↗ | Goodhart's Law: when a metric controls behavior, people optimize the metric rather than the underlying goal. |
| Gravity Field Empowerment | ↗ | Most improvement frameworks measure interventions by immediate effect — quarter-over-quarter lift, year-one ROI. |
| Halo Effect | ↗ | A single positive or negative impression biases judgments of all unrelated attributes. |
| Hanlons Razor | ↗ | Before assuming someone hurt you on purpose, construct the version where they made a mistake — and see how much evidence it explains. |
| Herzberg Two Factor | ↗ | Herzberg's 1959 Pittsburgh study found satisfaction and dissatisfaction are two independent axes. |
| Hidden Elite Advantages | ↗ | Top performers' results stem from nine hidden advantage dimensions — not visible actions. |
| Hindsight Bias | ↗ | Hindsight bias — the "I knew it all along" effect — is the tendency, after learning an outcome, to misremember your prior judgment as having been closer to that outcome than it act |
| Hyperbolic Discounting | ↗ | People discount the near future far more steeply than the distant future, producing dynamically inconsistent preferences: patient choices for next month reverse when next month arr |
| Incentive Design | ↗ | Behavior follows incentives more reliably than character, intent, or training. |
| Incremental Vs Leap Growth | ↗ | The most common strategic error is applying the wrong growth mode to a goal. |
| Industry Learning Sprint | ↗ | A structured 3-step process (financial reports → expert dialogue → unique view) for building a working industry mental model in approximately one week. |
| Insurance Agent Compliance Checklist | ↗ | |
| Insurance Coverage Gap Premortem | ↗ | |
| Insurance Renewal Retention Ladder | ↗ | |
| Insurance Suitability Principal Agent | ↗ | |
| Intrinsic Drive | ↗ | Intrinsic motivation is a portfolio of distinct sources — not a binary switch. |
| Inversion | ↗ | Most planning asks "how do I win?" and runs forward from there. |
| Jobs To Be Done | ↗ | People don't buy products — they hire products to do a job (make progress in a specific circumstance, across functional, emotional, and social dimensions). |
| K Factor Viral | ↗ | K = i × c, where i = average invites per existing user, c = conversion rate into new activated users. |
| Knowing And Doing As One | ↗ | When you say "I know I should but I just don't do it," the standard explanation is a failure of willpower. |
| Kotter Change | ↗ | John Kotter built this model from studying one hundred corporate transformations — most failed. |
| Landing Page Conversion | ↗ | A landing page converts when a visitor, in seconds, understands what it is, who it's for, why it's better, and what to do next — with nothing in the way. |
| Last Mover Advantage | ↗ | Most founders and strategists treat "first" as the prize: enter before anyone else and the market is yours. |
| Lateral Thinking | ↗ | Lateral thinking is the discipline of solving problems by approaching them from unexpected angles — not by going deeper along an existing logical path but by moving sideways to a n |
| Latticework | ↗ | Latticework is the practice of cross-wiring mental models from multiple disciplines on the same situation. |
| Lean Startup | ↗ | A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable, scalable business model under extreme uncertainty (Steve Blank). |
| Lifestage Value Curve | ↗ | Different life stages create different competitive advantages and demand different investments. |
| Lindy Effect | ↗ | For non-perishable items — ideas, books, technologies, institutions, practices — life expectancy is proportional to current age. |
| Logical Fallacies | ↗ | A fallacy is an argument that looks like it works but doesn't. |
| Loss Aversion Prospect Theory | ↗ | People evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point (not absolute wealth), weight losses ~2.25x as heavily as equivalent gains, are risk-averse in gain frames and risk-seeking i |
| Manager Development Spectrum | ↗ | Most leadership programs target skill acquisition. |
| Map Is Not The Territory | ↗ | Any representation — metric, model, strategy deck, org chart, or process manual — is a selective, simplified, aging abstraction. |
| Margin Of Safety | ↗ | Benjamin Graham introduced margin of safety in Security Analysis (1934) as the founding principle of value investing: buy assets at prices substantially below your estimate of intr |
| Maslow Hierarchy | ↗ | Maslow's Hierarchy proposes needs organize into levels of prepotency — lower needs must be at least partially met before higher needs become motivationally dominant. |
| Mece | ↗ | MECE is a decomposition principle: break a problem, set of options, or population into sub-groups that are Mutually Exclusive (no overlap) and Collectively Exhaustive (no gaps) — e |
| Metacognition | ↗ | Metacognition is the live monitoring loop during reasoning — "am I doing this right now; what strategy am I using; should I switch?" — not after-the-fact reflection. |
| Middle Way | ↗ | 中庸 (Zhongyong) is Confucian philosophy attributed to Zisi (c. |
| Minimum Viable Audience | ↗ | The Minimum Viable Audience (Seth Godin) is the smallest group of people whose problem you can solve so well they tell others — the deliberate opposite of appealing to everyone. |
| Minsky Moment | ↗ | A Minsky Moment is the point at which a leveraged financial system tips from apparent stability into rapid self-reinforcing collapse — caused by the internal dynamic of debt accumu |
| Momentum And Form | ↗ | Competitive advantage is two distinct things, not one: form (形, xíng) — the structural stock built before any contest (capital, distribution, brand, product, org capability) — and |
| Monopoly Vs Competition | ↗ | Under perfect competition, no firm makes economic profit: entrants arrive until price equals marginal cost, and every player fights for scraps while telling itself the fight builds |
| Mortgage Lo Comp Respa Design | ↗ | |
| Mortgage Loan Fallout Premortem | ↗ | |
| Mortgage Loan Program Matching | ↗ | |
| Mortgage Rate Negotiation Anchoring | ↗ | |
| Mortgage Trid Timeline Checklist | ↗ | |
| Mr Market | ↗ | Mr. |
| Mvp | ↗ | An MVP is not a small version of your product — it is a test instrument: the smallest artifact that produces trustworthy evidence about one specific demand-side assumption, with th |
| Narrative Fallacy | ↗ | The narrative fallacy is the tendency to construct retrospective causal stories that make past events seem inevitable — even when those events were largely random or contingent. |
| Narrow Gate Strategy | ↗ | The narrow gate is the path that is genuinely difficult, genuinely right, and genuinely compounding — avoided by most who prefer immediate legibility over long-term leverage. |
| Nash Equilibrium | ↗ | A Nash equilibrium is a stable point in multi-player interaction: a combination of strategies where no player can improve their payoff by unilaterally changing their own strategy, |
| Network Effects | ↗ | Some products get more valuable the more people use them — not because the company gets cheaper at scale, but because each user makes the product more useful to every other user. |
| Neurological Levels | ↗ | Robert Dilts' Neurological Levels maps how change propagates through a 6-level hierarchy (grounded in Bateson 1972): change at a HIGHER level cascades down automatically; change at |
| Nine Level Cognitive Tower | ↗ | The Nine-Level Cognitive Tower (九层塔) disaggregates cognitive development into nine distinct operating levels, each with observable behavioral signatures. |
| Non Consensus Thinking | ↗ | Every market — capital, talent, customers, ideas — prices the consensus view into its current state. |
| Non Zero Sum | ↗ | A non-zero-sum interaction is one where mutual gain (or mutual loss) is possible — the parties' outcomes do not simply cancel each other out. |
| North Star Metric | ↗ | The North Star Metric (NSM) is the single metric that most directly measures value delivered to customers and predicts revenue over time. |
| Nudge Theory | ↗ | People procrastinate on retirement savings, skip vaccine appointments, and leave privacy settings on dangerous defaults — not from ignorance, but because the choice environment wor |
| Objection Handling | ↗ | Objections are information, not rejection. |
| Occams Razor | ↗ | When several explanations all fit the evidence, prefer the one that assumes the least. |
| Okr Goal Setting | ↗ | OKRs separate ambition from measurement: an Objective is qualitative and aspirational; Key Results (3-5) are quantitative outcomes proving the objective was reached. |
| Ooda Loop | ↗ | Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) derived the OODA Loop from Korean War air-combat data: the F-86 Sabre achieved a ~10:1 kill ratio over the technically superior MiG-15 because better |
| Opportunity Cost | ↗ | Opportunity cost is the true cost of any choice: the value of the next-best alternative you give up. |
| Organic Plus Extension Growth | ↗ | Organic growth builds value from within (product, operations, retention, unit economics). |
| Overseas Expansion Framework | ↗ | International expansion forks into two models: Spirit Expansion (精神出海) — product/IP travels digitally or via exported goods, no local presence required — and Physical Expansion (实体 |
| Pareto Principle | ↗ | In most real systems, a small fraction of inputs produces the majority of outputs. |
| Peak End Rule | ↗ | People remember experiences not by averaging all moments but by sampling two: the peak (highest emotional intensity) and the end. |
| Pmf Crossing The Chasm | ↗ | Two distinct questions decide early-stage growth: (1) PMF — do enough users love the product they'd be very disappointed without it? (2) Chasm — can you move from early adopters (t |
| Point Line Plane Solid | ↗ | Maps competitive position across four strategic dimensions: Point (one capability, easily copied) → Line (integrated pipeline, integration is the asset) → Plane (platform/ecosystem |
| Porters Five Forces | ↗ | Some industries earn 30%+ margins decade after decade; others fail to earn their cost of capital despite intelligent, well-funded firms. |
| Positioning Obviously Awesome | ↗ | Positioning (April Dunford, Obviously Awesome, 2019) is the context you set so customers instantly understand why your product is great for them. |
| Power Law Distribution | ↗ | A power-law distribution is a statistical distribution where probability of size x is proportional to x^(−α): large events are rare but far more probable than a Gaussian model pred |
| Premortem | ↗ | Before committing to a plan, the team imagines that plan has already failed catastrophically, then works backward to enumerate causes. |
| Pricing Strategy | ↗ | Price is a structural decision, not a calculated number. |
| Principal Agent | ↗ | One party (the principal) delegates to another (the agent) whose interests differ and whose actions can't be fully observed — producing agency cost: monitoring spend + agent bondin |
| Prisoners Dilemma | ↗ | Whatever the other party does, each player is individually better off defecting — so both defect, and both end up worse than mutual cooperation. |
| Probabilistic Thinking | ↗ | Most reasoning is binary: will it happen, or won't it? That framing discards the most useful information — the degree of confidence — and produces predictions that cannot be checke |
| Ramen Profitability | ↗ | Ramen profitability (Paul Graham) = the startup makes just enough to cover the founders' basic living costs. |
| Realtor Closing Experience Peak End | ↗ | |
| Realtor Price Reduction Decision | ↗ | |
| Realtor Sphere Of Influence Ladder | ↗ | |
| Realtor Transaction Fair Housing Checklist | ↗ | |
| Reciprocity | ↗ | The rule of reciprocity — if someone gives you something, you owe them something back — recurs across virtually every documented human culture (Mauss 1925; Gouldner 1960). |
| Red Queen Effect | ↗ | The Red Queen Effect: competitors must continuously improve just to maintain relative position — because everyone else is improving simultaneously. |
| Referral Loop Design | ↗ | A referral loop is a repeatable cycle where using the product produces new users: a happy customer is prompted, at the right moment, with the right incentive and an easy share, and |
| Regression To The Mean | ↗ | Regression to the mean is the statistical regularity that any noisy measurement producing an extreme value tends to be followed on retest by a less-extreme value — because the extr |
| Regret Minimization | ↗ | Most frameworks optimize expected value — pick the highest probability-weighted payoff. |
| Repeated Games Reputation | ↗ | When parties repeat — or third parties observe — defection costs tomorrow's cooperation, flipping the Prisoner's Dilemma. |
| Representativeness Heuristic | ↗ | The representativeness heuristic is judging probability by how closely something resembles a prototype — overriding actual base rates. |
| Resource Integration Hierarchy | ↗ | Most organizations operate well below their potential resource access. |
| Resource Time Compression | ↗ | Most plans estimate how long each step takes and add them up — producing a multi-year sequential path that reflects a solo, resource-constrained default. |
| Reverse Information Paradox | ↗ | When you buy intelligence from an external AI, you pay for it twice. |
| Ria Adv Crs Compliance Checklist | ↗ | |
| Ria Client Behavior Coaching | ↗ | |
| Ria Client Margin Of Safety | ↗ | |
| Ria Fiduciary Conflict Disclosure | ↗ | |
| Ria Position Sizing Kelly | ↗ | |
| S Curve Technology Adoption | ↗ | Innovations spread on a sigmoid (S-shaped) curve: slow → accelerating → leveling off at saturation. |
| Scenario Planning | ↗ | Scenario planning accepts that certain futures are genuinely unknowable and prepares for several of them rather than betting on one forecast. |
| Second Curve | ↗ | Every business follows an S-curve: slow start, steep growth, peak, then decline. |
| Second Order Thinking | ↗ | First-level thinking asks "what will happen?" and stops. |
| Self Evolution 3d | ↗ | Treats personal growth as three orthogonal dimensions — Height (mission vantage), Width (perspective breadth), Depth (self-awareness accuracy) — each with a distinct mechanism and |
| Self Renewal | ↗ | Self-renewal is the structured practice of identifying which mental models have passed their expiry date and genuinely updating — not merely annotating — them. |
| Seven Questions Test | ↗ | Most business failures are not bad luck — they are unexamined answers. |
| Shi Momentum | ↗ | 势 (shì) is the propensity of a situation to evolve in a direction — a wave you read and ride, not power you exert. |
| Signaling Games | ↗ | One party knows something the other cannot verify. |
| Situational Leadership | ↗ | Match your leadership style to each person's development level on each specific task — cycling through four styles (Directing, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating) as competence and c |
| Six Thinking Hats | ↗ | Six Thinking Hats (Edward de Bono, 1985) prevents the most common meeting failure: different thinking modes colliding simultaneously. |
| Social Proof | ↗ | Social proof: we judge what is correct, normal, or worth doing by observing what others — especially similar others — are doing. |
| Sop Systemization | ↗ | A Standard Operating Procedure captures a recurring task as a documented, repeatable sequence so it can be handed to a person or an AI agent and produce the same result without you |
| Status Quo Bias | ↗ | Status quo bias is the systematic preference for the current state over available alternatives — even when alternatives are objectively superior by the person's own values. |
| Strategic Commitment | ↗ | Strategic commitment converts "I might do X" into "I will do X" — not through rhetoric but by changing payoff structure so follow-through is the rational move. |
| Strategic Execution 3d9 | ↗ | Execution failure is the most expensive strategy problem in organizations — not because strategies are wrong, but because organizations underinvest in the capability infrastructure |
| Strategic Spiral Momentum | ↗ | Strategic Spiral Momentum maps organizational strategy as a 10-phase cyclical spiral: 谋势 (plan) → 蓄势 (store) → 造势 (create) → 借势 (leverage) → 起势 (launch) → 乘势 (ride) → 定势 (stabilize |
| Strategy Execution Levers | ↗ | Most organizations apply a single intervention — a town hall, a kickoff — then diagnose failure as a communication problem. |
| Structured Communication | ↗ | Most communication failure is a failure of sequence and mode — not information. |
| Sunk Cost Fallacy | ↗ | The sunk-cost fallacy is the tendency to let prior, irrecoverable investments (money, time, effort, reputation) distort current decisions. |
| Survivorship Bias | ↗ | Survivorship bias is drawing conclusions from a sample pre-filtered by survival — treating survivor traits as the cause of survival when non-survivors (absent from data by definiti |
| Switching Costs | ↗ | Switching costs are everything a customer must pay, learn, redo, or risk to move from one product to another — financial, learning, data migration, integration, process, relational |
| Swot Analysis | ↗ | SWOT maps internal Strengths/Weaknesses against external Opportunities/Threats, then generates strategies via TOWS cross-matrix (SO/ST/WO/WT). |
| T Shaped Connector | ↗ | The T-shaped metaphor (deep vertical + broad horizontal) is widely used but rarely validated. |
| Tax Filing Position Consequences | ↗ | |
| Tax Prep 8867 Due Diligence | ↗ | |
| Tax Prep Pre File Audit Premortem | ↗ | |
| Tax Season Throughput Constraints | ↗ | |
| The Mom Test | ↗ | The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick, 2013) is a way to talk to customers so that even your mom can't give you a false positive. |
| Theory Of Constraints | ↗ | Theory of Constraints (TOC) — Eliyahu Goldratt, 1984: throughput of any multi-step system is determined by its single bottleneck. |
| Thought Experiment | ↗ | A thought experiment is structured reasoning: construct a scenario, trace logical consequences of explicit premises, examine the result for contradiction, hidden assumptions, or ne |
| Thousand True Fans | ↗ | Kevin Kelly's model: to make a living, a creator or niche business doesn't need millions — it needs ~1,000 true fans who will buy essentially anything you make. |
| Three Radius Model | ↗ | Three distinct circles govern performance: what you understand (cognition radius), what you can do (capability radius), and what you actually do (action radius). |
| Thucydides Trap | ↗ | Thucydides's Trap is the structural danger that emerges when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power — producing fear in the established power that makes conflict more |
| Timing Action Matrix | ↗ | Most frameworks ask: "Is this the right action?" Timing is an independent variable of equal weight — a brilliant action at the wrong time fails because of timing, not the action. |
| Tipping Point | ↗ | A tipping point is the threshold at which gradually accumulating change produces a sudden, self-reinforcing reorganization of a system. |
| Tragedy Of The Commons | ↗ | When a shared resource has individual access but no individual responsibility for preservation, rational users extract private benefit while the cost of overuse is shared — leading |
| Travel Cancellation Refund Decision | ↗ | |
| Travel Commission Markup Pricing | ↗ | |
| Travel Experience Peak End Design | ↗ | |
| Travel Repeat Client Ladder | ↗ | |
| Travel Trip Contingency Planning | ↗ | |
| Trust Brand Architecture | ↗ | Brand trust builds through three sequential layers: Functional Trust (does the product do what it claims?) → Emotional Trust (does this brand handle problems with empathy?) → Ident |
| Tunnel Vision Slack | ↗ | When urgent demands consume all your bandwidth, the future becomes cognitively inaccessible — not a choice, but a structural block. |
| Unit Economics Cac Ltv Payback | ↗ | Unit economics answer one question: does one customer make or lose money, and how fast do you get the money back? Growth on broken unit economics accelerates losses. |
| US Business Registry Open Data | ↗ | Several US states publish their entire business registry — every LLC, corporation, and nonprofit ever registered — as open data on Socrata portals, explicitly in the public domain |
| User Insight Engine | ↗ | User research produces data. |
| Utilitarianism | ↗ | Utilitarianism holds that the right action produces the greatest net well-being across all affected parties, weighted by magnitude and probability. |
| Value Chain Analysis | ↗ | Porter (1985) separates firm activities into primary (inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing/sales, service) and support (firm infrastructure, HR management, |
| Voltage Effect | ↗ | The voltage effect is John A. |
| When To Make First Hires | ↗ | Early hires are the highest-variance, highest-cost decisions a small founder makes: too early burns runway on unvalidated work; too late caps growth and burns the founder out. |
| Winners Curse | ↗ | The winner's curse is the systematic tendency, in a common-value auction — one where every bidder is estimating the same uncertain value from noisy private signals — for the winner |
| Wu Wei | ↗ | Wu wei (无为) — Daoist principle (Daodejing, ~4th century BCE): act without forcing, not without acting. |
| Zero Sum Game | ↗ | Zero-sum means total value is fixed — one player's gain is another's exact loss. |
| Zero To One Secrets | ↗ | Every great business is built around a secret: an important truth that is knowable but that few people know. |
Every skill footer points agents to https://www.deciqai.com/s/<skill>.json — a machine-readable endpoint returning the skill's definition, the latest raw SKILL.md URL, and its live playbook page. Agents can fetch it to check for a newer version before relying on time-sensitive content (benchmarks, regulations, pricing norms).
Transparency: these are plain, anonymous HTTP requests — the skills contain no telemetry, no identifiers, and work fully offline. The endpoint exists so installed copies can stay current; fetching it is always optional.
Want these skills to act instead of just reason? deciqAI agents run them autonomously against your live business data — start free.
Every skill in this library is guidance, not professional advice. Nothing here is legal, tax, accounting, financial, investment, insurance, or regulatory advice, and using a skill creates no professional relationship of any kind.
Skills covering regulated work deliberately carry no thresholds, rates, dollar limits, or filing dates — those expire, and a copy frozen in a prompt file is a liability rather than a feature. Every such question is routed to current authority instead. See CATALOG.md for which skills carry that constraint and why.
The output of a skill is a draft for a qualified person to review, correct, and own. Where a matter carries a professional duty, a licensing requirement, or a filing consequence, the credentialed practitioner who acts owns the decision — not the skill, not the agent running it, and not this repository.
Provided as-is under the MIT License, which includes its warranty and liability terms.
New skills and improvements to existing ones are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the skill anatomy, the template, and quality bars.
These are the same 237 skills wired into every deciqAI agent — which runs them autonomously to operate your company.