Watson Park – Merrimack, NH. This used to be an abandoned factory when I lived here.
Earlier in September, I flew back to New Hampshire for my high school reunion. It had been a full decade since I was back in my home town, and altogether I have only returned back to New Hampshire only six times since graduating college, with the gap in time between each successive visit growing longer than the previous one.
Since my last visit to my home town, Google Maps came out with a feature called Street View. Most of you, I’m sure, are already familiar with Street View. To recap, if you click the little man icon on Google Maps to call up Street View, you can click any illuminated street on the map to get a 360-degree panoramic view of that geographical point. In the month leading up to the reunion, I spent a lot of my free time re-exploring my home town on Street View, just to see how much it had changed since I left in the late 80s/early 90s. Quite frankly, I was shocked and even a little saddened to see how much certain parts of town had changed. It reminded me of those scenes in a science fiction movie, where the character gets warped into a parallel universe, where things are almost the same, but yet subtly and sinisterly different.
However, once I was actually back in my home town in person, the experience was vastly different. It helped in some way to get a sneak preview on Google Maps before actually arriving home; it softened the blow of seeing places that had gone or things that weren’t there before. But once I had a chance to drive around town, see things for myself, and talk to the people who had remained all this time, I realized that at its core, it was still very much the place where I grew up. The geography was still the same, and while some notable things had vanished, many other key landmarks still remained.
There’s an important practical lesson to be learned from this story: the map is not the territory. No matter how much time you spend studying a place on paper (or the Internet), you don’t get a full understanding of a place until you actually get there and allow all your senses to process it in the whole.
When I was training to be an officer in the Army, the instructors often harped upon the idea of the leader’s reconnaissance during a patrol. Prior to a mission, you as a leader may be limited in your planning to only from the map and the intelligence reports that you receive. However, once you get close to the objective, things can be a lot different that what you anticipated earlier. The intelligence report could have been wrong, outdated, or missed some small yet significant detail. Likewise, while the map showed a sloping hill in the forest, you didn’t fully experience before just how arduous traversing that slope really was, or that the woods aren’t as thick in this part of the forest as you had assumed.
Business also recognizes the importance of leaders witnessing firsthand what is going on in the business, rather than relying on second-hand information from their direct reports. In Toyota a common phrase used among managers is “going to gemba” (gemba being Japanese for “the real place”). What this meant for the automaker was that senior executives often spent a significant amount of time on the factory floor, witnessing what was happening and seeing the real effects of decisions they made in the conference room. Just as importantly, it also put them in direct contact with the employees, the people responsible for carrying out leadership’s decisions.
In the grand scheme of things, a map is a model, an abstraction of something in reality. A map can represent more than a geographic diagram – a business plan, organizational policy, or law are all maps, in a metaphorical sense. Maps are useful, because they allow us to predict and plan ahead before incurring the cost (actual or opportunitstic) of traveling there. But like all models, maps are a convenient oversimplification of reality and therefore inherently flawed.
Whatever you do, you have to see your product fully in the wild to know for certain whether it’s effective or not. If you are engineering a physical product, go to a store where the product is sold and talk to the salespeople who hear from the customers. If you contribute to a charity, go to where the charity is reaching out and seeing if the effort is actually helping the mission. If you write back-end software, become a user of the program to understand what the full user experience is. No matter how good (or bad) something appears in the abstract, you must go to the point of the experience and see it for yourself.