Analogy
The Map is Not the Terrain is like a financial statement.
Financial statements can paint a picture of what has happened in a company, but it is not the company itself. It is a snapshot of the past and cannot account for many crucial factors such as culture, innovation, resilience, market share, pricing power, and more.
While maps can be incredibly useful tools, mistakes often follow when we confuse this representation for reality itself.
Diagram
Example
In many organizations, people have become overly reliant on “maps” – budgets, strategic plans, annual reports, analyst reports, conference calls, financial statements – rather than dealing with reality directly. When paper representations begin to substitute for fluency in the terrain, navigation will suffer. The very success or failure of any commercial enterprise rests on considering “dynamic intangibles” that the map can never accurately capture. In fact, while this may seem drastic, it may even be beneficial to consider anything that can be neatly captured as non-critical. As Einstein said, “not everything that counts can be counted.”
A literal example of mistaking the map for the terrain occurred in 1846. James Clyman was a trapper in the mountains of the pioneering West, a man who could navigate the terrain blindfolded. One evening, Clyman happened upon a westward-bound wagon train and camped with them for the night, sharing their campfire. When told of their intended route through “The Hastings Cut-off,” Clyman was terrified. The mountain man urged the large party of men, women, and children using massive Conestoga wagons to reconsider. The veteran trapper had just come east via that very same route and had barely made it through, even though it was just him and his pack animal.
But the group would hear nothing of changing their planned route. They had a map that showed they could save several weeks by taking the cut-off. Nothing Clyman could say or do would change their minds, and they went forward as specified by their map.
That wagon train was, of course, the ill-fated Donner Party.
And, lastly, Michael Scott expertly demonstrates the danger of relying solely on maps:
Plain English
The map is not the terrain, and the name is not the nature.
The terrain is three-dimensional, while the maps that purport to depict it have but two dimensions. The extra third dimension matters as it can be the decisive factor!
If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain.
– Swedish Army Manual
This mental model is so important because it reminds us to see reality for what it is, and not how we wish it to be. For example, scratching out a valley on a map simply because we don’t want to cross it doesn’t mean it is no longer there. This sounds ludicrous, of course, but the functional equivalent happens every day! Customers tell us loud and clear that they are unhappy with the service we are providing, but we fail to enhance our customer service training because it is too inconvenient and expensive. However, what is more inconvenient – training today or irrelevance tomorrow?
Technical Description
The map/territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory” and that “the word is not the thing,” encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse models of reality with reality itself. The relationship has also been expressed in other terms, such as Alan Watts’s “The menu is not the meal.” – Wikipedia
Quotes
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
Knowing the name of something means nothing, we must know its essence. See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.
There is the famous story by Eddington about some people who went fishing in the sea with a net. Upon examining the size of the fish they had caught, they decided there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea! Their conclusion arose from the tool used and not from reality.
– Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
Our philosophies aren’t rules, they’re guidelines. They’re the keystones of our approach to any project, and although they are “set in stone,” their application to a situation isn’t. in every long-lasting business, the methods of conducting business may constantly change, but the values, the culture, and the philosophies remain constant. At Patagonia, these philosophies must be communicated to everyone working in every part of the company, so that each of us becomes empowered with the knowledge of the right course to take, without having to follow a rigid plan or wait for orders from the boss. Living the values and knowing the philosophy of each part of the company aligns us all in a common direction, promotes efficiency, and avoids the chaos that comes from poor communication. We have made many mistakes during the past decade, but at no point have we lost our way for very long. We have the philosophies for a rough map, the only kind that’s useful in a business world whose contours, unlike those of the mountains, change constantly without much warning.
– Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing
We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all…Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.
Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, made the point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile.” A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
A model which took account of all the variation of reality would be of no more use than a map at the scale of 1:1.
I visited the troops near Constances and found an armored division sitting on a road, while its headquarters, secreted behind an old church, was deeply engrossed in the study of maps. I asked why they had not crossed the Sienne. They told me they were making a study of it at the moment but could not find a place where it could be forded. I asked what effort they had made to find such a place and was informed that they were studying the map to that end. I then told them I had just waded across it, that it was not over two feet deep, and that the only defense I knew about was one machine gun which had fired very inaccurately at me. I repeated the Japanese proverb: “One look is worth one hundred reports” and asked them why in hell they had not gone down to the river personally. They learned the lesson and from then on were a very great division.
– General George Patton, War As I Knew It
A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than the side streets.
The Cartesian/Newtonian world view has influenced thought far beyond the physical sciences, and accounting is no exception. Double entry bookkeeping and the systems of income and wealth measurement that evolved from it since the 16th century are eminently Cartesian and Newtonian. They are predicated on ideas such as the whole being equal to the sum of the parts and effects being the result of infinitely divisible, linear causes…Quantum physicists and evolutionary biologists, among others, now believe that it is best to describe reality as a web of interconnected relationships that give rise to an ever-changing and evolving universe of objects that we perceive only partially with our limited senses. In that “Systemic” view of the world, nothing is merely the sum of the parts; parts have meaning only in reference to a greater whole in which everything is related to everything else…Why should accountants continue to believe that human organizations behave like machines if the scientists from whom they borrowed that mechanistic world view now see the universe from a very different perspective? The language of financial accounting merely asserts answers, it does not invite inquiry. In particular it leaves unchallenged the world view that underlies [the way] organizations operate. Thus, management accounting has served as a barrier to genuine organizational learning…Never again should management accounting be seen as a tool to drive people with measures. Its purpose must be to promote inquiry into the relationships, patterns, and processes that give rise to accounting measures.
– H. Thomas Johnson
Bankers, like city planners, have learned elaborate superstitions – the map – about what constitutes a slum and high risk rather than looking at the actual neighborhoods that are thriving – the terrain – to see what’s working and worth lending to. Like the pseudoscience of bloodletting, a whole structure and dogma has arisen over what works and what doesn’t in city planning. It almost sounds plausible but is built on a faulty structure
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Interconnected Ideas
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