I would like to introduce a new term to the lexicon, which I call “mental maps.”
In my role as an occasional advisor/guru/management consultant, I often (as you no doubt also do) find myself making fairly obvious statements of logic and/or fact, but the people at whom they are directed react strangely. They don’t argue it, they just seem to go blank, and they fail to acknowledge what I just said.
I actually wish they would argue. When they don’t, I know I have caused confusion in their mental map. Their mental map is the basis for every thought they have, and if it feels challenged, it generally runs and hides.
For all my good intentions, I have essentially caused their inner mental computer to freeze. I have not helped them. I have actually made things worse by making them flee to the comforting familiarity of their existing incorrect mental map. Damn.
If you observe someone doing something that does not make sense to you, just remember, in the context of their mental map, it makes complete sense to them– at least, it “feels” right. This explains the “odd” choices of people with political or religious views other than your own, as well as businesses that do not pass the TPS sniff test.
I will confess, I have my own mental maps. Part of growing up is discovering that your mental map is no good and you need to get a new one. This process should never end, but, sadly, all too often, we get to one version and stop. Changing one’s mental map is hard.
Mental maps are based either on direct experience or something we have been led to believe. I’ll give you a personal for-instance:
When I was a teenage bass player, I lived in a world of music schools and music teachers. In that realm, there was a fairly consistent dogma, that is to say, a mental map of reality: It openly stated that it was the job of the conductor to instruct the musicians on how to play every note, and an assumption that a great performance consisted of the removal of mistakes. Top-down six-sigma management, if you will.
So I sat in rehearsal after youth orchestra rehearsal, in which wrong notes were endlessly pointed out, and conductors insisted that we watch them as they waved their batons. While none of these people in authority were high level players or conductors themselves, they would tell us that they knew how it worked in the bigtime, and claimed that they were prepping us for that world.
So when I found myself actually playing in the Boston Pops Orchestra, I was presented with the rather severe shock that the “mental map” I had been taught of how orchestras worked was completely incorrect. I realized that if I wanted to stay in that orchestra, I had to completely re-write my mental map of how that world worked.
This was hard, as I had spent a lot of time and money learning the old map, and I also had a fair amount of pride for having mastered the old map. To give it up meant having to give up both status and a fond sense of achievement, and having to realize that I had been poorly served by people I had trusted, and start over from humility zero.
This was a hard choice. But I wanted to play in the Pops, so I made the gut wrenching choice to abandon the old mental map and start over with a new one.
Making this kind of difficult choice is key to real advancement or succeeding at anything. A bad map will get you nowhere, but we can be fond of our bad maps, because they were given to us by people we love, and they told us what we wanted to hear.
Now as a consultant, I have had to give up another incorrect map, this one of my own design: I always assumed that once I went off like Lewis and Clark and personally explored a given area of psychological terra incognita, everyone would listen to me when I returned.
Wrong.
Instead, I find myself in constant competition with other advice mongers who have never made the trip themselves, but they are still running around selling mental maps to the Louisiana Purchase, with promises of El Dorado and Fountains of Youth. Since our shared customer base has never been there in person, they have no way of knowing which is correct, and these incorrect maps are far more appealing.
As a management consultant, the most common mental maps I run into these days are all the mental maps to the internet, that is, about how Google “searches” and various online sales and promotion sites actually work.
When buying information on which to build your own mental map, it is essential to discern whether someone is giving you first hand or second hand map information. For example, I have never been to Mt Everest, so if I sell you a map to Everest, all I am doing is repeating what someone else told me.
I have been running my own web site for 25 years, so I have my own first hand mental map of how search engines operate. I have also tried many of these commonly touted systems and theories of “SEO,” and I have found by direct experimentation that they don’t work. If they do, well, correlation, not causation.
So again, how badly do you want to play in the Boston Pops, or in your case, achieve some other higher goal? Do you want to get there badly enough that you are ready to question the dogma-based maps that people are selling? Do you want to get there badly enough to accept the fact that maybe a whole lot of people you have trusted were perhaps misguided, and maybe even exploiting you by telling you what you wanted to hear instead of the hard truth?
Adjustments to mental maps are hard to accept. This difficulty is an extension of the “sunk cost” syndrome– the more money you have paid into a fallacious system, they harder it is to give it up, but doing so is necessary if you wish to move forward.
As the King of Siam sang,
And it puzzle me to learn
That tho’ a man may be in doubt of what he know
Very quickly he will fight
He’ll fight
to prove that what he does not know . . . is so.
One grand conclusion I’ve come to is that everyone’s mental map– my own included– is incomplete, and likely to have errors. And the more incorrect a mental map is, the more shameful, embarrassing, painful, and difficult it is to admit to it and alter it. The challenge is getting someone to question their mental map, especially the things in it that are limiting their perceptions, thus allowing them accept a new way of seeing themselves or of doing things. This alteration of “consciousness” is the real key, as the temporal solutions to most problems are already readily available.
