- Availability heuristic: "a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision" (Wikipedia).
- Bias blind spot: "recognizing the impact of biases on the judgement of others, while failing to see the impact of biases on one's own judgement" (Wikipedia).
- Broken window theory
- Brooks' law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" (Wikipedia).
- Bystander effect: "cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders." (Wikipedia).
- Cognitive dissonance: "discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time" (Wikipedia).
- Conceptual integrity: "It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." (Fred
- Confirmation bias: "the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities" (Wikipedia).
- Conway's law: "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations". Read the original paper
- Déformation professionnelle: "tendency to look at things from the point of view of one's own profession rather than from a broader perspective" (Wikipedia).
- Dominant design: "the one that wins the allegiance of the marketplace, the one that competitors and innovators must adhere to if they hope to command significant market following" (Wikipedia).
- Dunning–Kruger effect: "cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is" (Wikipedia)
- Fundamental attribution error: "the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external factors" (Wikipedia).
- Halo effect: "an observer's overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer's feelings and thoughts about that entity's character or properties" (Wikipedia).
- Hanlon's law: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (Wikipedia).
- Hindsight bias: "the inclination, after an event has occurred, to see the event as having been predictable, despite there having been little or no objective basis for predicting it" (Wikipedia).
- Hofstadter's Law: "it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" (Wikipedia).
- Learned helplessness
- Linus' law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
- Maslow's Pyramid
- Mere-exposure effect: "to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them" (Wikipedia).
- NIHITO (Nothing Important Happens In The Office): you need to learn from your customers and from the market first.
- Ninety-ninety: "the first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time" (Wikipedia).
- Outcome bias: "an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision when the outcome of that decision is already known" (Wikipedia).
- Overconfidence effect: "a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments" (Wikipedia).
- Pareto principle: "for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes".
- Parkinson's law: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" (Wikipedia).
- Parkinson's law of triviality: "members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues" (Wikipedia). "A committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task."
- Path dependence: "how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant" (Wikipedia).
- Peter's principle: "managers rise to the level of their incompetence" (Wikipedia).
- Pocket veto: "maneuver that allows a president or other official with veto power to exercise that power over a bill by taking no action" (Wikipedia).
- Pre-mortem
- Principle of least astonishment: "component of a system should behave in a manner consistent with how users of that component are likely to expect it to behave" (Wikipedia).
- Prisoner's dilemma: "a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely "rational" individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so."
- Robustness principle: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" (Wikipedia).
- Sayre's law: "in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake" (Wikipedia).
- Sunk cost fallacy: "people justify increased investment of money, time, lives, etc. in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment" (Wikipedia)
- Task relevant maturity: "How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it – his task relevant maturity… as the subordinate’s work improves over time, you should respond with a corresponding reduction in the intensity of the monitoring." (Intel CEO Andy Grove).
- Tragedy of the commons: "a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource."
- Volunteer's Dilemma: "a situation in which each of X players faces the decision of either making a small sacrifice from which all will benefit, or freeriding."
SMART is a mnemonic acronym, giving criteria to guide in the setting of objectives, for example in project management, employee-performance management and personal development. The letters S and M usually mean specific and measurable. Possibly the most common version has the remaining letters referring to achievable, relevant and time-bound. -- SMART criteria - Wikipedia