Culture Is The Territory

Alfred Korzybski, was a scholar in the field of general semantics. Although his work is extensive in the field and he is oft quoted I want to draw attention to his thoughts about map and territory. Korzybski says:

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

A map is a useful tool, it can provide valuable insight and some relevant context but it is limited. A map can give you an idea of what you are viewing but it can’t provide a multi-dimensional picture. If one extrapolates this reasoning to business and social environments it is easier to see where maps are limited. A map can be more than a directional tool. A map can also be of use within organizations. A map can be an organizational chart, a manual of operation, a statement of purpose and more. All of these provide limited context but they do not fully account for the breadth of the organization. An example is a map tool many of us use quite often Google Maps. If you think about Google Maps when traversing NYC, it can guide you from Union Square to SoHo but it provides little context as to what the actual territory consists of. It won’t tell you the stories of the homes and businesses that exist along your route. It won’t have the history of the neighborhood. In order to understand your map and have it represented as territory you need culture.

Culture provides the necessary color and context to make a simple map limited by its inherent structure far more robust. In short, culture is the territory. A recent WSJ article highlighting former State Department official Robin Raphael is an instructional case study for how the organizational map is limited often with far reaching consequences. Ms. Raphael ran afoul of the FBI and others in the intelligence community primarily because of the cultural differences within their respective organizations. Ms. Raphael having worked and lived in Pakistan, as a diplomat understood the territory because she knew the culture in which she was operating. The FBI only understood the map, including the organizational structure of titles and roles, which Ms. Raphael consistently bumped up against. The map versus the territory is a relevant distinction with real world ramifications.

A map is an abstraction of our physical reality. It provides a scale to denote distance but it does not truly represent our world. Culture fills in those gaps and allows the user to unleash the limitations of boundaries, as culture is almost limitless. The duality of the nature of culture means it is both limitless and constantly shifting. Because culture is hard to grasp there is a rush to place measurable limits on its importance and efficacy. Data has become one of the primary ways to bind culture to seemingly easy metrics. The data acts as a confirming bias that serves to mitigate risk in cultural spaces. Embracing culture however requires you to accept its unpredictable nature. Your map needs to incorporate the unbound nature of culture and as a participant in culture spaces you have to be comfortable with being “uncomfortable”. Data doesn’t make the map any more relevant if it does not also use culture to frame the territory. Data measures the risk of an action, but it does not measure the risk of NOT doing something. There is inherently a predictive nature to culture because in its rawest forms it exists on the margins. That doesn’t mean it is always a perfect indication of where relevant (and cool) insights are headed but your chances of hitting those marks is much better. Again, there is a risk to NOT doing something/participating in cultural territory.

Again, the map provides a starting point but it is culture that is the territory. The territory and its many potential lessons is what are important. I mentioned that culture is unpredictable; this is true. But it doesn’t mean it does not have a predictive nature. We must expand our expectations of what that means. Our cultural sample sizes, now still traditionally beholden to demographic measurements, must become larger and more diverse. A data model designed to generate the most likely singular predictive outcome is broken. The territory that culture covers will have several potential outcomes within a given set of variables. Culture is embedded with multiples possibilities. Often those possibilities exist where the signals are the weakest i.e. on the margins. Some of these signals might be non-existent by traditional quantitative tools because they are not attuned to catch them. They are measuring a map, looking at predetermined coordinates. Only by adapting a territorial approach to culture can you identify and evaluate all that the territory has to offer.