A thought experiment replaces gut-feel decision-making with a disciplined “what if” that runs before you spend money or time. The most useful business thinking tools — pre-mortems, inversion, second-order effects — are simply structured ways to attack a plan from angles your optimism would otherwise skip. This generator pairs your specific challenge with the right mental model and assembles a prompt that makes an LLM run the experiment rigorously.
How it works
You write the challenge — a decision, a bet, or a stuck point — and choose a mental model. A pre-mortem imagines the project has already failed and works backwards to the causes. Inversion asks how you would guarantee the worst outcome, then avoids those moves. Second-order effects trace the consequences of consequences. The tool also offers “apply several,” which instructs the model to run multiple lenses and reconcile what they reveal. The generated prompt tells the model to stay concrete, quantify where possible, and finish with prioritised next actions. Everything is assembled in your browser.
Tips and examples
Make your challenge statement specific and decision-shaped — “Should we drop our free tier next quarter to improve margins?” yields a far richer experiment than “thinking about pricing.” For high-stakes calls, run a pre-mortem first to expose failure modes, then run a second-order-effects pass to check the fixes do not create new problems. Treat the output as a hypothesis generator, not an oracle: the value is in the non-obvious risks and consequences it surfaces, which you then verify against your own knowledge. Save the prompts you find most useful and reuse them as a standing decision ritual before any irreversible commitment.