Very rarely does something happen with no chain of events to follow. It’s your job to look past the positive reinforcement and gratification you may receive, which frankly may be blinding you, and understand what could go wrong, how wrong it could go, and why it might go wrong. What if you viewed each decision as having the potential to topple other dominoes and set about identifying them? Tedious yet informative. Second-order thinking allows you to project the totality of your decisions. Even if you don’t change your decision because of what you determine through second-order thinking, you think through ten times as many scenarios and thus make far more informed choices than you would otherwise. Sometimes, that’s the best we can do as a person. We can’t predict the future, but we can’t not think about it.
— Mental Models: 30 Thinking Tools that Separate the Average From the Exceptional. Improved Decision-Making, Logical Analysis, and Problem-Solving by Peter Hollins