Mental Mapping in an Age of Construction
The maps that mattered in the Age of Discovery were geographic. The maps that matter now are cognitive and are in need of an update.
The world always makes sense. But it doesn’t always make sense to us. What we see depends on how we look at it. Surprise, a constant theme in boardrooms, in capitals, and in living rooms, is a sign that whatever perspective we’ve been using to see the world no longer shows us things as they really are.
It is when the world stops making sense to us that we need a new map, a new narrative that better represents reality. But coming up with one, and making it stick, is not easy. Consider this: in the early 1500s, Copernicus taught us that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. We’ve lived with this insight for 500 years. Why, then, do we still gather at the waterfront to watch the “sunset”?
The reality, as any photograph from the International Space Station would make clear, is “earthspin.” We, not the sun, are traveling across the sky to turn day into night. But that simple, centuries-old truth hasn’t yet penetrated our language. It hasn’t yet penetrated our thinking. Every “sunrise” and “sunset” should be a powerful reminder that our everyday narratives can warp and distort our ability to see things as they really are.
Our “maps” of the world exist mainly in the language, or narratives, we use to frame concepts and issues. Words are just the shared mental maps we use to navigate through the world. Leaders steeped in conventional strategy may be skeptical of the power of mental maps, or narratives, to shape understanding of industries, problems, or priorities. But consider how the multiplication of information has diminished leaders’ capacity to articulate the world to themselves, often forcing them to become consumers of other people’s narratives. We may talk about “disruption” in our own industries because that is the narrative being passed around, but what we mean when we use it remains fuzzy to ourselves and others. And when the map is fuzzy, so are the actions that follow.
When I first co-wrote a version of this piece in 2017, we argued that map-making, or map-remaking, is an essential activity when steering an organization during times of rapid change. Nine years later, we are not merely in a time of rapid change. We are at what Carlota Perez would call an inflexion between techno-economic paradigms, a moment when the rules that governed the previous era are visibly fraying and the rules of the next one have not yet been written. The narratives we inherited from the Information Age, narratives about disruption, about software, about the primacy of bits over atoms, are actively misleading us. They are not just outdated. They are dangerous because they conceal the very terrain we most urgently need to navigate.
In such moments, the ability to draw new maps is not just useful. It is a competitive imperative, an institutional imperative, and, for societies navigating great transitions, an existential one.
Renaissance Wisdom on Mapping New Worlds
In other periods of rapid change, the ability to create new maps separated those who adapted successfully from those who were paralyzed by the pace of change. The Renaissance, an analogous moment of transformation driven by globalization (the voyages of discovery) and a revolution in information technology (Gutenberg’s printing press), offers vivid examples. How people saw the present, their narrative, drove their adaptations and led their transformations.
From flat maps to globes. The first successful Atlantic empire-builders, Spain and Portugal, switched from modelling the world as flat to modelling it as spherical, not because they suddenly discovered that the world was round (Europe had known that since the time of Ancient Greece), but to better visualize crucial business questions. The oceans to Europe’s east and west had both been proven navigable, and in 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas drew a single vertical line to divide the lands beyond Europe between the two countries. But in whose territory did the economically significant Spice Islands lie, on the other side of the globe? And which way was the shortest route to getting there? Visualizing the Earth as a sphere helped clarify and answer those strategic questions.
From sacred to inspired art. Medieval art was flat and formulaic. Its main purpose was religious, to tell a sacred story. Plagiarism was common practice; innovation was irreverent. The invention of linear perspective, plus new knowledge in anatomy and natural science, were absent from European art until Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, da Vinci, and others validated them within a new narrative: the artist’s job was to capture a fragment of God’s creation as he saw it. These artists became famous for works that presented increasingly lifelike, original, and secular visions of the world.
From luxury to mass medium. Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press in the 1450s, ended life bankrupt. Why? Because books were a luxury, useful to few, owned by even fewer, and the economics of Gutenberg’s printing press made sense only in large-volume runs. Gutenberg struggled to find books that demanded mass production. But over time, the new printing technology helped change people’s ideas about books and the purpose they could serve. By the 1520s, when Martin Luther directed all laypeople to read the Bible as a way to care for their own souls, books were becoming the new medium in which ideas reached mass audiences. The Bible has since been printed over 5 billion times. The technology was not the revolution. The new mental map, the narrative that books were for everyone and not just for elites, was.
The common thread across all three examples is that a new capability did not automatically produce a new world. What produced the new world was a new narrative about what the capability meant and what it made possible. The gap between the emergence of a capability and the emergence of an adequate narrative around it can last decades, even centuries. We are living in such a gap right now.