Sounds obvious enough, but conflicts sometimes arise when maps are mistaken for the territory.
“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness". This quote dates from Alex Korzybski’s observations published in 1933, but it is part of the rationale still for the study of NLP, neurolinguistic programming.
The similar structure that Korzybski talks about may account for usefulness, but it also accounts for misuse, either deliberate or accidental. And far from just a parlor game where the eyes reveal if the brain is remembering or looking ahead, NLP takes a look at the way the brain frames experiences. It is an important concept in persuading, in seeking assistance, and in exploring new territory within or external to that already described.
A map just by definition is a model, and not the reality itself. Even an online map constructed by inputting the start address and the destination address comes with a disclaimer: that the user should check roads and conditions because some of them might have changed. Why? Because a map in its most literal form is not the territory.
In everyday discourse, the maps of professional consultants, whether they are medical practitioners, professors and teachers, lawyers, or community agencies, to name just a few, show themselves sometimes to be different from the maps of those who consult them, and different also from those of other consultants whose interests intersect theirs.
What complicates that further is that once a topic is framed according to personal beliefs, the tendency is to use that frame again.
That is because our personal maps depend first of all on what we directly experience from the environment by using our senses. But we then we also filter experience through personal belief systems; values we have distilled from our other experiences; memories from those experiences and from those of others who have told us about theirs; and broader cultural memories that have accrued.
This can be beneficial. Understanding the maps of others who have observed the same territory can be expedient in persuasion, for instance—if you remember that they are only maps.
And if you can’t find a way in to wrap your mind around an experience, you can observe the similar experiences of others and their maps of it. That's one way that members of support groups help each other. And they offer possible ways to frame sometimes overwhelming experiences for those who have never encountered them previously.
Members can borrow someone else’s maps to see if they fit the territory in ways that their own, up to now, haven’t. Maps can be tried and tweaked, and supplanted by another one. But what intrigues us about researchers, inventors, and pioneers is their moxie in finding new territory.
In trying to solve issues of national health insurance, personal health, and interpersonal communication, understanding whether it is the map or the territory that is at issue can free everyone to adjust expectations and create dialogue.
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