The map is not the territory. This idea, from Alfred Korzybski, is one of the most practically useful concepts I’ve come across in over 20 years of work, and the version most people know comes from George Box: “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”
Your financial forecast is a model, your org chart is a model, and your understanding of what your competitor is doing is a model. They are simplifications that leave things out, and that’s fine, as long as you remember they’re incomplete.
Many people understand this concept, but underestimate how widely it applies. One of the most fundamental maps is language itself.
When I say the word “risk” in a board meeting, I mean something specific. I’m thinking about probability-weighted downside scenarios, cash flow exposure, maybe tail events. The head of sales hears “risk” and thinks about losing a deal, while the head of engineering hears it and thinks about system reliability. We’re all nodding along, using the same word, having three different conversations.
We recognise this problem immediately when we travel abroad. You try to order something in another language and you know there’s a gap between what you said and what was understood, so you slow down, you stay on alert, you check. But sitting in a room full of people who speak the same language, you assume alignment. You assume the words landing in someone else’s head carry the same meaning they carried when they left yours, and that assumption is almost always at least partially wrong.
I’ve watched entire projects go sideways because two senior leaders agreed on a “strategy” in a meeting and walked away with completely different pictures of what that word meant. Neither was wrong; they just had different maps and no one thought to compare them.
Every word you use is filtered through the other person’s experience, their career, their last disagreement with their boss, their personal definition of “soon” or “urgent” or “good enough.” The dictionary gives you a shared starting point, but it doesn’t give you a shared understanding.
So what do you actually do with this?
In finance, I’ve learned to be obsessive about defining terms at the start of any conversation that matters. Not because people are stupid, but because smart people are the most likely to assume they already understand. When I say “we need to be aggressive with this estimate,” I follow it with a number or a range, because conservative on its own is just a map, and my aggressive is often someone else’s conservative .
In any working relationship, the simplest upgrade you can make is to ask “what does that look like to you?” more often. Not in a condescending way, just as a habit. You will be surprised how often two people in complete agreement are actually picturing very different outcomes.
This applies everywhere. With your partner, your kids, your friends. The map you carry around in your head was built from your experiences, your reading, your specific set of mistakes. Theirs was built differently. The words might be identical, but the maps behind them rarely are.
Your models are often useful, so keep using them. Just hold them loosely enough to update when reality shows you something your map didn’t predict.