Cartographers once marked the edges of known territory with 'here be dragons' — not because they believed in sea monsters, but because honest mapmakers understood that the boundary of a map is not the boundary of the world. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American philosopher who founded General Semantics in the 1930s, made this the cornerstone of his thinking: he called it the 'map-territory relation,' but his deeper claim was more unsettling than the slogan. He argued that every mental model you hold doesn't just simplify reality — it actively filters what you're capable of perceiving next. The map doesn't show you where dragons are. It shows you where you stopped looking. For a PM or leader, this has a precise implication: the mental model you reach for fastest is the one most worth auditing, because fluency and blindness develop together. The model that helped you ship the last three features may be structuring what questions you're not yet asking about the fourth.

Name the mental model you've used most confidently this quarter — then describe one category of product or team reality it structurally cannot show you.

Drawing from General Semantics — Alfred Korzybski (Science and Sanity, 1933)