Don't have many mantras, although I stress the importance of understanding before trying to solve.

One that does stand out is more of a question:

"What am I not thinking here?" or "What are we forgetting here?" - Followed by estimations based on meta-biases and human error tendencies to make some hypotheses where cognitive, social, or cultural blind spots might be. And then comes the testing, followed by more hypotheses. And so on.

After all, every field of thought is developed by humans. It's a common point of failure.