The Map is Not the Territory

The best question I know is…

What would I LOVE to do? I don’t always know the ANSWER, but it’s a great place to start.

As in all things in life, there are concepts - principles – that when we adopt them enable us to experience better results than if we’re without them.

The map is not the territory is one of those important foundation principles, upon which other concepts can be built.

Not matter how accurate we believe we are being, we cannot represent the world accurately to ourselves.

Map of the world (in those days known), after Claudius Ptolemy's work (Egyptian Roman, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and geographer in 2nd century), engraved by Johannes Schnitzer, Ulm, 1492

The best map of the world can only ever be a map, it cannot be the world itself.

We can only ever re-present the world to ourselves based on our own maps of reality, rather than reality itself.

Just like the scholars in the second century constructed a map of the world that represented their reality, it could never be reality itself. 

The map of the world today today is just as much a perception of our current reality as the maps of the past.

Everything is perception.

On a personal level your map of the world will be unique to your values, attitudes, beliefs, experiences, and stories. No two maps are the same. Even when we think we are on the “same page”, we are still talking about our own unique map.

What this means for us and our lives is the importance of clarity. We need to understand and define our map, before we can come from a meta-position. To be aware of your map, without being involved in it.

We need to become insanely curious about our own map and through exploration develop a view of our own internal landscape.

On some level, everything that we do, even the self-sabotage and procrastination, work for us. It might keep us safe from hurt, keep us feeling happy, or comfortable. Whatever it gives us, it means we will continue with that map, regardless of its flaws.

Using logic to change isn’t working - else we would have done it by now and most of us are painfully aware of our limitations to sometimes create meaningful change in our lives. To make progress, we need to get curious about how this is working for us and what it is costing us.

When we look at Meta Dynamics ? we learn that we have around two million bits of information coming at us every second. Yet we can only process 134 bits, or 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of information.

This means that we are constantly deleting, distorting, and generalising this information so we can allow in what we consider relevant and leave out what we consider irrelevant.

Even as you are reading this, you are deleting, distorting, and generalising the information in this article according to your map.

The question is: Is that what we are leaving out, changing and generalising about working for us?

SHOULD WE BE CHANGING WHAT WE ‘FILTER’ OUT?

TO GET THE RESULTS WE WANT, DO WE NEED TO CHANGE OUR MAP?

We need to filter out a large chunk of information coming at our senses or we would we unable to function.

We filter to protect ourselves, yet sometimes what we filter is what we need.

Through a series of models, frameworks, and foundational principles we can start to gain clarity of our map, what we filter out, what we let in and build a picture of our perception of reality.

Whilst we can only ever perceive a version of our reality, we can develop awareness of our map – a meta-position. 

Over the next articles you will be able to learn more about the macro and micro patterns that define your map.

Christiane is an Agile Coach, Meta Dynamics Coach and Visual Facilitator. She joined The Coaching Institutes’ Professional Master Coach Program in order to gain deep knowledge of human behaviour, She works with teams and individuals on developing high performance and connected relationships. You can follow her on Twitter under @agiledynamics