Map-Territory Confusion - Kirk & Blackbeard

In May 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin — sixty years old, celebrated— sailed from Greenhithe, England with two ships, 129 men, and someone else's plan. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror carried three years of provisions, a twelve-hundred-volume library, and silver-plated cutlery. Their route, through the heart of Inuit waters, had been drawn in London on maps that showed a warm, navigable Open Polar Sea waiting beyond the coastal ice. Drafted by Sir John Barrow himself, Second Secretary of the Admiralty — eighty-two, never been to the Arctic. Franklin's orders were to sail it exactly as drawn. By July, the ships had crossed to Greenland and resupplied at Disko Bay. Two whaling captains saw them in Baffin Bay, heading north into the ice. After a brutal first winter in the high Arctic, the ice broke in the summer of 1846. Franklin pushed south down Peel Sound, still following Barrow's line on the chart. On 12 September, both ships froze into the ice off King William Island. They never moved again.

The Inuit were right there. This was their territory. They visited the trapped ships, walked across the ice, came aboard, and met Franklin and his officers face to face. They knew the waters, the ice cycles, and the land routes south. For nearly two years the crew sat in the ice with the answer at arm's length — but Franklin was a Royal Navy captain executing Admiralty orders. The Inuit weren't a source of knowledge; they weren't on the map at all. Franklin died in June 1847. By April 1848, the survivors abandoned ship and walked south into the Arctic. None made it home.

For the next hundred and seventy years, the Inuit told every search party exactly where the ships had sunk. They were ignored — until 2014 and 2016, when researchers finally listened to Inuit oral knowledge and found both wrecks precisely where the Inuit had always said they were. The Admiralty had the finest maps of the Arctic in the world. The Inuit had the Arctic.

In May 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin — sixty years old, celebrated— sailed from Greenhithe, England with two ships, 129 men, and someone else's plan. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror carried three years of provisions, a twelve-hundred-volume library, and silver-plated cutlery. Their route, through the heart of Inuit waters, had been drawn in London on maps that showed a warm, navigable Open Polar Sea waiting beyond the coastal ice. Drafted by Sir John Barrow himself, Second Secretary of the Admiralty — eighty-two, never been to the Arctic. Franklin's orders were to sail it exactly as drawn. By July, the ships had crossed to Greenland and resupplied at Disko Bay. Two whaling captains saw them in Baffin Bay, heading north into the ice. After a brutal first winter in the high Arctic, the ice broke in the summer of 1846. Franklin pushed south down Peel Sound, still following Barrow's line on the chart. On 12 September, both ships froze into the ice off King William Island. They never moved again.

The Inuit were right there. This was their territory. They visited the trapped ships, walked across the ice, came aboard, and met Franklin and his officers face to face. They knew the waters, the ice cycles, and the land routes south. For nearly two years the crew sat in the ice with the answer at arm's length — but Franklin was a Royal Navy captain executing Admiralty orders. The Inuit weren't a source of knowledge; they weren't on the map at all. Franklin died in June 1847. By April 1848, the survivors abandoned ship and walked south into the Arctic. None made it home.

For the next hundred and seventy years, the Inuit told every search party exactly where the ships had sunk. They were ignored — until 2014 and 2016, when researchers finally listened to Inuit oral knowledge and found both wrecks precisely where the Inuit had always said they were. The Admiralty had the finest maps of the Arctic in the world. The Inuit had the Arctic.

What is it?

Strategy decks, operating models, org charts, risk frameworks, transformation roadmaps — these abstractions are necessary for leading at scale. When confidence grows, leaders forget that models are models. The abstraction starts to feel like mastery — and leaders who have never touched the territory become convinced they understand it better than the people who work in it every day. They sail on the map instead of the sea.

Why does it matter?

The higher you sit in an organisation, the more of your world is representation. Front-line staff deal with customers, systems, and situations. Senior leaders deal with reports about customers, models of systems, and summaries of situations. Hierarchy makes it inevitable. But it means that leadership operates at a distance from reality that grows with every layer of abstraction.

That distance has a cost. Transformation programmes burn through budgets hitting every milestone on the roadmap while changing nothing about how work actually gets done. Features are prioritised from frameworks and roadmaps while the support queue already shows what customers actually need — three layers below the room where decisions are made. The pattern shows up as surprise: the quarter that misses, the client that leaves, the competitor that shipped what your own teams proposed and were ignored.

What causes it?

The altitude of leadership. Running an organisation requires abstraction. You cannot hold the full complexity of a living system in a boardroom. So you build models, and the models become how you see. Over time, the models become all you see. The further leadership sits from operations, the more the map becomes the only reality available — and the harder it becomes to remember it was ever a simplification.

The authority of the abstract. A strategy framework looks rigorous. An operating model looks complete. A risk register looks comprehensive. These representations carry an implicit promise: that reality has been captured, structured, and made governable. Messy, contradictory signals from the territory feel unreliable by comparison. Leadership gravitates toward the version of reality it can steer — not the version it needs to understand.

The plan that defends itself. When reality contradicts the model, organisations rarely discard the model. Especially one they paid a top-tier consultancy to build. They commission a revised model. They add a new framework. Each refinement adds another layer of abstraction between leadership and the system — and each layer feels like progress, because the map is getting more detailed. For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

How to recognise it:

When leadership debates strategy through slides and frameworks, and nobody in the room has recent, direct contact with customers or operations.
When the plan is on track but the people closest to the work describe a different reality — and the plan is believed.
When a model is contradicted by events and the response is to refine the model rather than revisit the assumptions.
When the organisation is richly informed, rigorously governed, and increasingly surprised by what actually happens.

What you can do:

Close the distance. Build leadership routines that create direct, unmediated contact with customers, operations, and front-line reality. Not through reports. Not through town halls. Through presence.
Name what the model leaves out. Every abstraction is a choice about what to ignore. Make that choice visible. Ask what the strategy deck cannot show you, what the operating model assumes away, what the risk framework was never designed to see.
Watch for the refinement reflex. When reality contradicts the model and the response is a more detailed model, that is the pattern defending itself. The answer is less abstraction, not more.
Treat the gap between the map and the territory as information. When people closest to the work describe a reality that leadership doesn't recognise, that gap is the most valuable signal in the organisation. Protect it.

What is it?

Strategy decks, operating models, org charts, risk frameworks, transformation roadmaps — these abstractions are necessary for leading at scale. When confidence grows, leaders forget that models are models. The abstraction starts to feel like mastery — and leaders who have never touched the territory become convinced they understand it better than the people who work in it every day. They sail on the map instead of the sea.

Why does it matter?

The higher you sit in an organisation, the more of your world is representation. Front-line staff deal with customers, systems, and situations. Senior leaders deal with reports about customers, models of systems, and summaries of situations. Hierarchy makes it inevitable. But it means that leadership operates at a distance from reality that grows with every layer of abstraction.

That distance has a cost. Transformation programmes burn through budgets hitting every milestone on the roadmap while changing nothing about how work actually gets done. Features are prioritised from frameworks and roadmaps while the support queue already shows what customers actually need — three layers below the room where decisions are made. The pattern shows up as surprise: the quarter that misses, the client that leaves, the competitor that shipped what your own teams proposed and were ignored.

What causes it?

The altitude of leadership. Running an organisation requires abstraction. You cannot hold the full complexity of a living system in a boardroom. So you build models, and the models become how you see. Over time, the models become all you see. The further leadership sits from operations, the more the map becomes the only reality available — and the harder it becomes to remember it was ever a simplification.

The authority of the abstract. A strategy framework looks rigorous. An operating model looks complete. A risk register looks comprehensive. These representations carry an implicit promise: that reality has been captured, structured, and made governable. Messy, contradictory signals from the territory feel unreliable by comparison. Leadership gravitates toward the version of reality it can steer — not the version it needs to understand.

The plan that defends itself. When reality contradicts the model, organisations rarely discard the model. Especially one they paid a top-tier consultancy to build. They commission a revised model. They add a new framework. Each refinement adds another layer of abstraction between leadership and the system — and each layer feels like progress, because the map is getting more detailed. For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

How to recognise it:

When leadership debates strategy through slides and frameworks, and nobody in the room has recent, direct contact with customers or operations.
When the plan is on track but the people closest to the work describe a different reality — and the plan is believed.
When a model is contradicted by events and the response is to refine the model rather than revisit the assumptions.
When the organisation is richly informed, rigorously governed, and increasingly surprised by what actually happens.

What you can do:

Close the distance. Build leadership routines that create direct, unmediated contact with customers, operations, and front-line reality. Not through reports. Not through town halls. Through presence.
Name what the model leaves out. Every abstraction is a choice about what to ignore. Make that choice visible. Ask what the strategy deck cannot show you, what the operating model assumes away, what the risk framework was never designed to see.
Watch for the refinement reflex. When reality contradicts the model and the response is a more detailed model, that is the pattern defending itself. The answer is less abstraction, not more.
Treat the gap between the map and the territory as information. When people closest to the work describe a reality that leadership doesn't recognise, that gap is the most valuable signal in the organisation. Protect it.

What is it?

Why does it matter?

What causes it?

How to recognise it:

What you can do:

What is it?

Why does it matter?

What causes it?

How to recognise it:

What you can do:

Let's talk.

Let's talk.

Let's talk.