The Map is not the Territory

I want to believe.

Everybody lies. – Gregory House, M.D

You’re not going to like this: I rarely take anything you tell me at face value.

When we start working together, the first day has this rhythm and ritual to it. We sit down to talk about where you are and what you’re trying to do. You get that slight wince, but you eventually tell me about some incident or tension that you’ve been dealing with (or not). You might admit to being frustrated—maybe even at wit’s end. And then you give me the goods.

You do it with the best of intentions. You want to help me do my job, which starts with getting to know you better. You want me to have all the relevant info about who you are, what you’re up to, and how you’re going about it. So you share your strategy, OKRs, org charts, vision, mission, values, or some combination of those. You give me all the clues, all the evidence about what’s happening here.

But those things are not the real story. They’re what you want the story to be.

See, there’s this gap between what we say the strategy is and what it actually is. There’s a delta between culture the way we wish it were and the way it plays out. There’s even a difference between your OKRs and what your priorities really are. And that’s okay.

Knowing that gap and managing it—that’s where the real work is. Everything you want to make better lives and dies in that gap.

Let me be clear: I don’t doubt you and the things you give me because I think you’re lying to me. Not intentionally anyway. I doubt those things because I am an avid student of human behavior. I question what I see and hear because you need me to question it.

It’s a necessary part of the job. I need that stuff.

You want to grow your company. You want to know what’s holding you back. You want to know where your blind spots are. You want to be more focused. You want clarity.

At least that’s what you tell me.

The map is not the territory.

It’s a tough thing for a founder, CEO, or any leader to acknowledge not knowing something so personal, but the reality is that we all have our blind spots—things we don’t know about ourselves but others do. What keeps those in our blind spots is the stories we tell, and at the team and company level, those stories are expressed in strategy, OKRs, and culture. They’re the map of where we are and where we’re going.

But the map is not the territory.

Take a look at a map of Alamosa County, Colorado. It sits at the center of the southern edge of the state. Just shy of 15,000 people live there and have a median age of 31 and a median household income of $29,447. It spreads over 723 square miles and has less than one square mile covered by water. Location, population, income, and size. You now know the main things you need to know about Alamosa, right?

Not even close. A third of the people in Alamosa County are Catholic. They’re swing voters who have voted for the winning Presidential candidate in all but four elections. Alamosa is home to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, a geological anomaly at the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains containing alpine tundra, subalpine forests, montane woodlands, and riparian zones. The roads there are narrow and sunbaked, and there are tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes.

You can try to cross Alamosa County using just the map, but the journey is going to be less predictable than you think.

Your strategy, OKRs, and even that culture guide describe important points for your company, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that they tell the whole story, either. Your company has its own believers and swing voters. It has beautiful anomalies and diverse characteristics.

And it has its tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes.

Objectives and metrics and org charts matter in a company, especially in the early stages. We create these things because we have goals and ambitions. Writing them down makes them more likely to become real and shared—makes us more likely to do them. But there’s a step beyond that that is squarely in your responsibility: you have to close the gap between words and actions. You have to align the map and the territory.

Confused? Let me make it clear:

When I want to know what your strategy is, I look at the budget and the CEO’s calendar. That’s what the real strategy is: what you spend your time and money on.

When I want to know what the real objectives are, I listen for what people spend the most time talking about in meetings. Those are your priorities right now.

When I want to know what the real org chart is, I’ll listen for who can approve or block something. I listen for who people talk about as a mentor or a guide. That’s where the real authority is.

To the degree those are different, that’s where your real work is. There’s the old maxim that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It’s clever. It’s pithy. But no one ever explains what it means.

Here’s what it means: because culture is what people do when there’s no guide for what to do, and since most things in people’s work day do not fall within strategy or OKRs, culture works more often. Culture gets more time on stage. While your intentions live in a document, your habits direct the show.

Strategy and OKRs tell you the high-level stuff—the map. Culture tells you about the narrow roads and tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes—the territory. Your job is to manage the journey with clarity about both. When you see them both—and plan with that clarity—the journey goes a lot better. You’re more likely to get where you’re going.

Choosing integrity.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant

We cling to some things and avoid others for good reasons. Once defined, strategy and OKRs have a clarity to them. They are consistent and clean, which creates a sense of relief and calm. Delivering complicated projects is difficult, which causes stress.

Culture and values, once agreed and written down, seem simple and manageable. Noticing that the culture is bigger and wilder than the document is a dance with complexity. It’s easier to insist that the document is the culture rather than the default behaviors that are the real culture.

There’s always a gap between what we say about a company and how it really is. There’s also a way to tame that tension, though, and it doesn’t require that you do more—just do a couple of things differently. Here’s how to close the gap and build integrity into the way you lead:

Make the strategy, the OKRs, and the culture daily work rather than event work. Workshops and offsites and all-hands meetings are great. Your weekly coaching session is essential (you have one of those, right?). Your performance at the board meeting is critical to growing the company. But none of those things are the work.

The work is the work. If strategy is important enough for an offsite, it’s important enough to build into your weekly team meeting. If OKRs are worth a day of your team’s time every quarter, they’re worth talking about every week—not just once every twelve weeks. You have to build these things into what you do. The more you bring the event-based stuff into daily work, the more it becomes real. If it isn’t, why bother?

Measure more often. We don’t need to go into the nuances of leading and lagging indicators here. You know that more sales calls translates into more sales. You know that fewer onboarding complaints lead to better customer satisfaction. What I want you to know right now is that anything you aren’t measuring on the regular is going to slip away from you. When you look more often at your key indicators—ideally during the normal course of work—you get to close the gap between what you say you’re doing and what you’re actually doing.

You might call that integrity.

Build intentions into your habits. No matter what you present to your board, publish on your website, or put on your posters, your habits are your reality. As the saying goes, the way you do anything is the way you do everything.

Habits are your default actions between the plans and the slogans. They’re often unconscious, but they don’t have to be. You have a choice about those things that make up the vast majority of your life: you can take a good hard look and make sure they are what you want to do—who you want to be—or you can keep them out of your awareness, where they’ll exact a tax on how you build your company. Carl Jung put a fine point on it:

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

There’s the work. For you and your company (they aren’t as different as you think, and they are more tightly coupled than you realize), a better strategy or a clean handful of value statements aren’t going to build the company you want. Building those ideals into the reality of your everyday work will.

A quick word:

When I write, it’s usually because I see something I want people to know about—a pattern. This post is one of those. I have the honor of working with some of the most talented leaders and entrepreneurs in the world. Even the most self-aware of them deal with the cognitive dissonance between what they say and what they and their teams do. The most successful of them know that reconciling words and actions is a daily job, one that requires clarity and honesty—and constant vigilance against self-deception.