The map is not the territory.

In a recent post by Stephen de Groot (the billion dollar question) he posits that information is not meaning, and that problems persist, arise and get worse, not due to miscommunication, but due to a misunderstanding of meaning. This got me thinking about the adage "the map is not the territory", a quote commonly attributed to either Michael White (founder of narrative therapy) or Gregory Bateson (systems and cybernetics fellow). It turns out if you dig a little deeper, the phrase was actually coined by a guy named Alfred Korzybski, a Polish immigrant who worked in the field of general semantics in the early 1900s.

So....what the hell does that actually mean? It means that models and representations of objects are not the objects themselves. Of course, this makes intuitive sense. An actual map of Calgary, by necessity, has been scaled down to be practical. Many, many details have been filtered out in the process of creating a "good enough" or "useful enough" representation of the streets and pathways of the city for general navigation. Buildings are omitted. Some streets don't have names on them. You certainly can't see the cracks in the sidewalk. This representation of Calgary is useful in helping you to navigate from point A to point B, but looking at a point on the map is an entirely different experience from standing in that location in the real world, being exposed to all the details that were filtered out to create the map.

Maps and models are useful (that's why we make them), but they're also deeply flawed and subject to the effects of value-filtering by whomever is making the map or model, and the "snapshot in time" effect of building a model of something that is constantly changing. A map of 1963 Calgary is wildly different from a 2016 version.

And just like physical models of reality, our mental models of reality are subject to the same flaws and values-biases.

We create mental models of the world all the time. There is simply too much information, too much stimulus, for us to accurately process in the time we have. All you have to do is go for a walk around your block, intentionally looking for things you've never noticed before, to realize how much filtering takes place to keep your busy life humming along without getting bogged down in data-processing. Today I noticed a pair of pink Adirondack chairs on a neighbors deck while walking the dogs. I've probably walked that route hundreds of times in the past, and had "seen" the chairs, but they'd been filtered out as extraneous information, or it's possible that the owners of the house just bought the chairs and my mental model was updated this evening.

Now, try and imagine what we're missing in the rest of our lives due to the mental models that we've created, and the information that has to be trimmed out to make that model useful. About people, organizations, political parties, entire countries or ethnicity's... it might actually be that overcoming our own mental models, removing some of the filters (by asking the billion dollar question, among others) that restrict those models from growing and evolving, is one of the key challenges that society faces in tackling many systemic issues.

And how do we go about revising our mental models? Well, now that we're aware that we have them (and they're flawed), we can start by noticing what we might otherwise miss, and asking questions of our assumptions and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, who others are, and how the world works. We might also start to examine where our mental models come from...whether or not they're actually ours, or inherited from our parents, educational system or spiritual school of thought.

Good luck!

-Jeff