Moving day was a day to think about mental models and expertise.

My husband and I were both hopeful about fitting our remaining worldly goods into a shell-type moving container. After all, we had disencumbered ourselves of a dining room, 3 bedrooms, most of the basement, half of the kitchen. We had filled bags and boxes for BBBS pickups, given freely to the local teen and music centers, dutifully lugged our excess construction supplies to Habitat Restore, become near-daily posters on Freecycle, and maintained a giveaway table on our front lawn for weeks. We felt significantly lightened. Being engineers, we even computed our total cubic feet: close to, but under, the limit.

Initially our movers were optimistic as well, but as the done-by time approached with significant remaining work and drastically decreasing space,  needling presentiments of doom poked into my head. Boxes can be shipped, but the furniture simply had to go into the shell. Yet after almost 3 hours, most of the boxes were in, while easily a third of the furniture, including many larger pieces, lay in wait. My mental model was to put in the must-go items first, then deal with the fallout. Why weren’t my movers doing that?

As it turned out, my mental model was incorrect, based on surmise rather than expertise. Our job was a challenging one, but not impossible, and by the end of the day all the furniture and all but 8 boxes were loaded; even the bicycles got loaded. The correct model for this sort of work, the one the experts have, is to load the big and irregular items alternating with the smaller or more regular items, for fit, for structural integrity, for weight balance, to minimize shifting, for many reasons.

In so many aspects of life, we make judgments or decisions based on incorrect mental models. Our models seem right to us, they are based on what we see as logic, on the information we have, and they make sense. But they are often wrong. Since no one can be an expert on everything, or even on most things, maybe the best we can do is to be open to the idea that our ideas may not be right. That might help us feel less stressed when things aren’t going the way we think they should be, and optimistic that a situation that feels worrisome or threatening will turn out fine.

Meanwhile, more data will available when we find out whether our belongings survive the move.