Every mental model you carry was built by someone who was wrong about something adjacent to it. Alfred Korzybski — the Polish-American thinker who founded General Semantics in the 1930s — spent his career documenting what he called 'semantic reactions': the automatic, pre-conscious flinch of the nervous system that treats a word or map as if it were the territory itself. The insight goes deeper than 'the map is not the territory.' His real claim was that the distortion isn't a bug you can patch out — it's structural. A model doesn't just simplify reality; it actively suppresses the signal that would falsify it, because your nervous system has already categorized the incoming data using the model before you consciously register it. For product managers and leaders, this means the moment you recognize a situation as 'a prioritization problem' or 'a stakeholder alignment issue,' you've already run the world through a filter that will make solutions outside that category invisible — not unconvincing, invisible. The practical discipline isn't skepticism about your models in the abstract. It's catching the label you applied before you applied it — which requires a one-second habit of asking, when you name a problem: what would someone who rejected this category entirely call what they're seeing?

What is the last problem you named — and what category of solution did that name automatically rule out before you'd thought about it?

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933)