The map is not the territory
This originally appeared in the Out of the Weeds newsletter. Subscribe for weekly, actionable insights to improve your business.
Our outcome in life is determined by three influences:
- Luck
- Decisions
- Actions
I am lumping our starting point (family, location, economic status) and factors that affect us throughout our lives together in the luck category.
This issue will focus on our decisions and how we make them.
Whenever possible, it’s best to make decisions with more, and more useful, information.
If you start with incomplete information, you get misguided decisions.
If you start with inaccurate information, you get misguided decisions.
All else being equal, we want the highest quantity of the highest quality information about any situation.
However, one thing we must be leery of is the quest for perfect information.
Perfect information about an unknown decision doesn’t exist.
The Map is Not the Territory
↓
As we face difficult decisions, we always want more info. And rightfully so. But there is an upper limit to the quality and quantity of the information we can gather.
“The Map is Not the Territory” is a phrase coined by the Polish-American philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski. He used it to convey the fact that people often confuse models of reality with reality itself.
It’s a general thinking concept to help us navigate through life.
Any map that contains enough detail to accurately reflect the world must be the same size as the world and is no longer useful. The use case for a map is putting it in your pocket and carrying it around with you (or beautifully displaying it on a wall). In either case, the map by its very nature must be smaller than the thing it represents, and therefore cannot provide complete information.
If we want to make decisions with perfect information (if we want the map TO BE the territory), then we have to live out the decision, see what happens, and then gather the information. Of course, the only way to live out the situation is to make the decision in the first place.
This paradox in the time-space continuum represents the problem with finding perfect and perfectly complete information — it just can’t be done.
So not only can we not have perfect information, we can’t even have nearly perfect information. And I’ll show you a few reasons why.
Cost of acquisition
Let’s look at a business example. A company is doing market research for a new product. They want to know how profitable it will be.
In order to do that, they need to know their raw material costs, their manufacturing costs, their marketing costs, their sales costs, their selling prices, their total market size, their product demand, and the timing of when the product will become available.
In order to gain that information, they can do studies, but to get perfect information, they’ll have to actually assemble the supply chain, hire a sales and marketing team, produce the collateral, and get the product in stores.
Not only is all that extremely cost-prohibitive, but it’s also a complete product launch.
You can’t launch a product in order to determine how much it will cost to launch.
The map cannot be the territory. Otherwise, it’s just reality.
Money isn’t the only cost required to gain near-perfect information. Time is another.
Time required to make decisions
Let’s set aside perfect or near-perfect information and look at a company that wants really great information. Doesn’t have to be perfect but they want as complete a picture as is reasonable.
In order to do that, they won’t literally launch the product but they’ll have meetings on top of meetings on top of calls on top of meetings.
Every decision they make will be delayed, and by the time they make it, their initial assumptions have become outdated. So they can either circle back to their first assumptions and correct them, giving their later assumptions time to become outdated, or they can accept their imperfect information and move on.
The quest for more and better information must be led with common sense to avoid endlessly searching and chasing one’s tail in pursuit of that final piece of the puzzle.
The importance of unknown factors
We can’t get perfect information.
We can’t get near-perfect information.
But we usually try to get as close as possible.
The problem is that no matter how much information you gather, you can’t get it all.
I recently spoke to a group of investment advisors about risk, and used this example:
If you invest in the stock market, you can expect negative stretches. Periods of sustained losses. That’s not really even a risk, right? It’s a known factor.
Almost no one puts all their money in the stock market because they know periods of loss are an inevitable outcome.
But if you invest in the stock market and a pandemic breaks out that disrupts the entire global economy and the stock market tanks, that’s an unquantifiable risk. That’s what matters. That’s what’s going to derail your retirement plan or force you to sell your home.
You can gather all the information you want, and do all the planning you want, but you can’t plan for the unforeseen.
So we shouldn’t plan then?
Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”
And I agree wholeheartedly.
Though we’ll never have perfect, near-perfect, or mostly perfect information, we should still try to gather enough to help us make decisions.
The threshold or amount of information you should shoot for is anyone’s guess. The main thing to learn is to be comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.
The map is not the territory and never can be.
Only in hindsight can we see exactly how things played out, and even then we usually prescribe meaning to events that have none.
It’s really hard to know what will happen in the future and it’s pretty hard to know why something happened in the past.
Applying this concept
Cut yourself some slack.
Move fast, make decisions, and make mistakes.
You’ll never have perfect information, no one else does either.
Gather as much as you can in a reasonable time period, make a decision, learn from your mistakes, and do better next time.
