Marshall's last building block of higher-order thinking he names, half-jokingly, "paranoia" — or, "if we want to put it in a nicer way," curiosity. Where the 5 Whys looks *backward* to a root cause, paranoia looks *forward*. He invokes Toyota's "5 Whys" for the backward direction: a car won't start → battery dead → alternator failed → alternator belt broken → belt beyond its useful service life and not replaced → the vehicle wasn't maintained on the recommended schedule. The broken alternator was "merely a symptom of a general problem of a lack of maintenance." (Full backward technique: [[The 5 Whys (IDEO)]].) Paranoia drills the same way but *before* the fact. It asks: "Why could this go wrong here? What else matters? What are we missing, if anything? How could this affect stuff we weren't anticipating? Are we leaving huge gains on the table? Are we taking risks we don't want to take?" "There's no magic to curiosity or paranoia — you just do it, thoroughly." Marshall recommends running it twice: alone on paper to get the rough shape, then in dialog with smart people, because each surfaces consequences the other misses. --- *Source: [[Book Inventory/Progression|Progression]] (Sebastian Marshall, 2016) — Uncommon Virtues #3 — Higher-Order Thinking*