A map is not the territory it represents — but most leaders forget this and start navigating by the map alone. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American linguist who founded General Semantics in the 1930s, argued that the mental models we build to understand situations are always simplifications, and the danger isn't having a model — it's forgetting you have one. The moment you stop treating your map as a rough sketch and start treating it as the landscape itself, you stop updating it. New information gets filtered out. Disconfirming signals get explained away. The fix isn't to have better models — it's to hold them more lightly. Before your next important decision, ask: am I reading the actual situation, or am I reading my model of it?

Think of a belief you hold about someone on your team or in your life. When did you last actually test it against evidence, rather than collecting moments that confirm it?

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski