A mental model is a set of assumptions that are used by the brain to understand reality. The more these assumptions become taken for granted, the less their logic are questioned.

Take a kid for example. Every experience this kid has is followed by a surprised look in his eyes. That means every time this kid is building his own whole reality. It is the “third why” Ricardo mentions.

As time goes by, though, the kid’s surprise is less noticeable. The kid is now creating some lenses to watch reality. These lenses quickly become the default view of the world.

This is what Ricardo argues; that we lack the capacity to question the third why. And the only way to do that is by breaking with the old mental models and building new ones, which are to be questioned again and again, in a renewing cycle that results in the so called innovation.

Although I am not a software developer or a user of agile development methodologies, I agree with Francisco when he brings up Ricardo’s ideas to this field. In the same way of Ricardo’s new organizational model, agile is new, is innovative, is a mental model breakthrough, and because of that it is sometimes misanderstood by those who are still living in the old times.

Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it a silver bullet? Time should tell. Or maybe one should ask the oppositors of agile for “precise answers”; they at least may be precisely wrong.