The first time I heard the expression “the map is not the territory” was from my old pal Joseph Pritchard.
At first, like many things Joseph said over the years, it didn’t make much sense to me. But in the years since, I’ve kept coming back to this expression as summarising the root of a lot of the problems inside organisations.
The example Joseph used to help reinforce the point was the classic London Underground map, drawn by Harry Beck, which is rightly seen as an iconic piece of design work.
However, if you know London at all, you’ll know it’s not an exact representation of the city. Far from it – some of the stations appear much closer together on the London Underground map than they are if you walked or drove between the two – others are much further apart.
Does that mean the map is useless, given its many inaccuracies?
Not at all. For a start, the fact that the London Underground map has lasted in much the same form since the 1930s suggests that generations of Londoners and tourists have had a lasting benefit from it. Despite the fact it’s widely known to not be an exact representation of the city of London on the ground.
But also, in communications, there is a trade-off to be made between total accuracy and ease of transmitting the information.
When I explain double-entry bookkeeping to someone who’s never done it before, I use a Sherlock Holmes story to explain how it works. I don’t start with “well, back in 1494, an Italian monk called Luca Pacioli wrote a book called Summa de Arithmetica, in which he set out the principles of debits and credits we use today.”
Is there some information that accounting nerds might find fascinating between 1494 and today that I skip over when explaining double-entry bookkeeping through my Sherlock Holmes story? There certainly are.
But I’m not usually wanting to give someone a Mastermind quiz on “The History of Double-Entry Bookkeeping: 1494 to the Present Day”. I just want them to understand how it works so they can do their job properly.
I’m very conscious that the map is not the territory when it comes to my explanation of double-entry bookkeeping – instead, I deliver a “map” of how to navigate it which helps people understand how double-entry bookkeeping works in a simple-to-understand and, I hope, memorable way.
Ditto Harry Beck with his London Underground map.
He wanted people to find their way around London easily. He wasn’t nearly so bothered about explaining that Charing Cross and Embankment stations are much closer to one another at street level than the Tube map would make you think.
The problem isn’t the map
The problem with this sort of communication isn’t the map.
It’s mistaking the map for the territory, and thinking that one is an accurate representation of the other.
Imagine, for example, someone who gets a contract to replace all the paving stones on London’s pavements, but they have to arrange deliveries of the required number of paving stones to each Tube station, and the stones delivered to each station have to reach to the next station on the line, where the next delivery batch awaits.
If all they were given to plan with was a London Underground map, this would be a complete fiasco. At some stations 10x the number of stones required would turn up. At others, not nearly enough.
So, of course, no sane person bidding for this imaginary contract would prepare a quote based on the Tube map. They would get out on the streets and measure all the distances for themselves, before calculating the number of paving stones required to stretch from one station to the next, and arranging their paving stone deliveries accordingly.
But many organisations get confused and imagine the map really is the territory.
That’s not entirely the fault of people running those organisations. For people who need to learn something about a specific discipline or activity, we have to break the process down into small chunks and build up gently from there. Especially early on, we will generally skip over a few of the trickier details because, at that point, the person we’re teaching don’t know enough about the discipline to go into depth to understand fully.
That’s the way most of us are taught at school and university, whatever subjects we took.
The problem here, though, is that not only are you just given a map when you are being taught about any field of endeavour, and not only does that convey very little understanding of the real-world nuances you’ll encounter. But also, the map you’re given is only partial.
Imagine, for example, having to navigate from Plaistow, on the District Line, across London to Perivale on the Metropolitan Line, but only being given a map of the Northern Line to accomplish your mission with.
Now the map of the Northern Line might be factually accurate as far as it goes (with the accompanying “map not being the territory” caveats, of course). It’s just completely useless for your objective of travelling from Plaistow to Perivale on the London Underground network.
Some areas are harder than others
Confusing a map with the territory is where many organisations go wrong.
That’s especially true for people in those organisations with a background in tech, engineering and…ahem…accounting.
Those professions seem to find it very easy to confuse the map with the territory, largely because they all work mostly on surface logic. People with those backgrounds sometimes struggle to see features which are beyond the realms of pure logic and/or which are not visible on the surface, even when those features represent a major driver of the problem.
Which isn’t entirely the fault of those professionals, because, in most academic realms, but those three in particular, you get to progress in your career by going deeper into the nuts and bolts of a subject.
By the time of my final professional exams, for example, the work I was doing was still double-entry bookkeeping at heart, but it was a transformatively more sophisticated version of what I’d done in my very first double-entry bookkeeping class a few years earlier.
Unfortunately, most real-world problems don’t present themselves like that.
They generally can’t be solved by going deeper. They can only be solved by going wider.
If you work in tech, engineering, or accounting – or, heaven forbid, you’re a politician, who are particularly poor at this – you’ll find that hard to cope with.
Relatively few people from those professions are comfortable moving into an illogical world where deeper motivations drive people’s behaviours than whatever they can see on the surface.
In the interests of full disclosure, I wouldn’t claim this is something I do perfectly myself. So I’m not being disrespectful to the professions mentioned above (although I’m very happy to be disrespectful to politicians).
I’m just illustrating how hard it is to solve problems when all you’ve got is an entirely logical, surface-level view of the world, and a map which will be of very little help getting you from Plaistow to Perivale.
An example
Let’s make this real with an example.
At the moment, politicians are making a lot of fuss about the cost of the NHS. And, in the unholiest of unholy alliances, politicians seem to think that “more technology to drive efficiencies” is best the way to bring the costs down.
In general, that’s baloney. Although not surprising from two groups as intellectually challenged as tech folk and politicians. One group is super smart in the computer lab, but super dumb in the real world. The other group isn’t even smart in a computer lab.
But, when the problem is defined by politicians as “how do we run the NHS but spend less money on it?”, it’s easy to see why people as dumb as the average politician thinks that tech might have the answer. And it’s equally understandable why tech people are more than happy to sell tech solutions which claim to do that (although they rarely do, in practice).
Thinking more broadly, instead of more deeply, you get an entirely different perspective.
Because of cuts elsewhere in sectors like education and social care, the NHS has become the public service of last resort for many.
Which makes no sense, because inside a busy A+E department is just about the most expensive place to try to solve many of the problems which only present themselves there because people have nowhere else to go.
Compounding the problem, if you introduce more activity into an already insanely busy, high-pressure environment, you’re very unlikely to make that more efficient.
More likely everything becomes dramatically less efficient and, because people are waiting longer and longer for treatment, and that treatment can only be superficial because another boatload of ambulances just turned up with 20 more people who need urgent treatment, outcomes are poorer as well.
Which, in turn, means many those same people will be back in a few weeks’ time because whatever problem they had last time either hasn’t been fully dealt with, or they’ve found themselves in exactly the same situation again. For example, an old lady who had a fall this week and ended up in A+E, in the absence of any other intervention, is pretty likely to have another fall in a few weeks’ time and end up in A+E again.
In that environment, unless you’re a tech industry grifter with a product to sell, or a politician being paid off by a tech donor, defining the problem you’re trying to solve as existing entirely within a busy A+E department will likely deliver little or no real world improvement – although it will have the usually not-coincidental side benefits of making lots of money for the tech company and the politicians concerned.
Going broader, not deeper
Of course, sometimes problems get solved by going deeper, not broader. Especially when the problem is an “in domain” problem.
If I prepare a report which doesn’t add up to the number I thought it should, I’m going to check that the Excel formula is correct, and that the range of cells the formula is working with are correctly specified.
As is, for example, a piece of code not delivering visitors to the intended page destination when they click a link on a website.
The solution to those problems is not “out there”. It’s “in here”, within the same domain where the problem manifests itself.
But that’s true of relatively few problems nowadays. The biggest problems of our time will not be solved by “in domain” expertise.
It’s one reason I think AI will never work. The people running AI companies think the reason their software is largely nonsense is because of a shortage of deeper, in-domain expertise. I can pretty much guarantee it isn’t – not least because of the fact that, after spending several years and billions of dollars in development funding, it that statement was true, we would already have perfect AI everywhere. Yet it’s still mostly garbage.
There’s another element to the problem of reducing the cost of the NHS that tech folk, politicians, and a fair few accountants, I’m sorry to say, don’t fully appreciate.
And that’s because the ultimate low-cost solution might involve spending more money somewhere else.
Those groups find that really hard to understand, but as any good CFO knows, the secret to truly effective organisational cost reduction is understanding that what matters in the end is the balance of costs across the organisation, not the spend in any specific department.
For example, if I can spend 2x what I spend now in Department A, but save 10x that amount across Departments B, C and D as a consequence, the lowest operating costs for the business as a whole are reached by doubling Department A’s budget.
Remarkably few organisations will make that choice in practice, I’ve found…to my eternal mystification. But what we’ve done here is move from thinking deeper to thinking broader and, like most of the problems in the world today, that’s where you’ll find almost all of the solutions.
I say that with confidence because, given the amount of time, money and resources spent over the last several decades trying to solve problems by going deeper, we’ve got more problems in the world than ever. If “deeper” was the solution, most of the world’s problems would have been solved by now.
And they haven’t. So we need to try something different, and go broader instead.
Where to start
For the NHS, there are two woefully neglected areas of our public services which directly lead to bulging A+E departments, and packed hospital beds.
Firstly, fix the education system so that people have hope for the future and a decent job to go to. There’s been a criminal lack of investment in education for as long as I can remember – especially in our Further Education Colleges which could be a tremendous source of economic growth if anyone in government ever cared enough about them to invest properly in the skills that lead to jobs, which in turn lead to vibrant, healthy communities.
A tiny fraction of the multi-million pound budget required to build and equip a brand new hospital, were it to be invested in FE and the education sector more generally, would return many times the economic and social benefits of a new hospital to patch people up after they have already become unhealthy and despondent.
Secondly, invest in social care. The NHS spends a large proportion of its budget dealing with the problems of frailty in old age, one way or another. Again, tiny factions of the budget for a new hospital spent on social care instead would minimise the number of times some of the most frequent client groups (not just the elderly) turn up in A+E for help because they have nowhere else to go.
While those two actions on their own won’t solve every problem in the NHS, they’ll make a pretty good start. And, despite spending more in some areas (eg schools, colleges, and social care) the savings from not having to build more and more hospitals will lead to a lower cost of public services overall.
To solve problems like this, we need to remember that the map isn’t the territory.
Once we define “the map” as “how do we reduce the cost of an emergency operation in A+E?”, we stop looking for solutions outside the operating theatre in a hospital. Even though that’s where the biggest solutions are likely to be found.
For tech folk and politicians, the map is the territory. They are incapable of thinking any other way.
So, when it comes to any areas where an unholy alliance of tech folk and politicians are to be found, you should give their solutions about as much credence as you would to a guy who gives you a map of the Northern Line to help you find your way from Plaistow to Perivale.
Unless you want to go down the tubes.