If you haven't yet, a reminder to take part in the inaugural Weak Signals Survey [https://www.neuegeo.org/the-weak-signals-survey] by Feb 28. Take 5 minutes to pause, reflect, and add your perspective to the rich mix of students, elders, CEOs, new recruits, Americans, Chinese, artists, lawyers and more, all reflecting on the same deep questions.

e.g., Question #12: “What is something you know is broken but don't know how to fix?"

The full report in March will be available exclusively to those who take part.

If you’ve already taken part, refer others to join the conversation or subscribe.

Four Questions to Widen your Next Reality Check

“The map is not the territory,” the philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously wrote — a pithy reminder to always doubt what we think we know about the world.

Korzybski’s wisdom feels timely again. Successive, global crisis events have hammered home the lesson that we cannot afford to be passive map-takers. Every map embeds choices about what to pay attention to and what to ignore. And in a time of rapid change, these choices can expire fast.

So yes, it’s time to recheck the relationship between our maps and our reality. But it’s a bigger rethink than our classic conception of “maps” suggests. Contrary to Korzybski’s famous dictum, nowadays the map often is the territory. Or the map makes the territory. Or the map actively hides the territory.

Our maps and the territory relate in at least four distinct ways. Each relationship offers its own peril. Each begs a distinct question to spark your original thinking and reimagine the world around you.

Opportunity for Action

This issue explores four questions:

The map is not the territory...So what are we excluding?
The map is the territory...So what else are we causing to exist?
The map makes the territory...So what are we failing to imagine?
The map hides the territory…So what are the presumptions we cannot see?

One common feature across all these questions is that they are difficult to answer for people who think the same way we do — and easy to answer for people who don’t.

In this tangled moment, it's very easy in theory to get help from people who think differently. It's often hard in practice. Here are practical next steps for individuals and organizations to convene the exploration...

Spark Conversation

Wrong is still real.

There is a popular cartoon of a crowd of people approaching a fork in the road. The fork is labelled “Answers.” The left path is marked by an arrow that reads “Simple but Wrong.” The right path is marked by an arrow that reads “Complex but Right.” Almost everyone takes the left turn, and promptly walks off a cliff. Very few take the winding road to the right.

The takeaway is that we need to have the courage to reject simple truths to arrive at better ones – even if the way is difficult.

What the picture gets wrong is that all these people turning left do not all fall off a cliff.

They go on living. They go on believing. More likely than not, they go on to shape the world that the few people who turned right must live in. (Social media is the obvious example.)

The representation – right or wrong – can become our reality. The map makes the territory.

Does your world need this insight? What is the topic that this picture represents, in your work, life or community?

Discover a new map? Share it with us on social media @neuegeo.

Discover Brave New Thinkers

Connect with people and ideas that can help you rethink death & dying:

Bookmark the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Diagrams. Diagrams are one of the oldest forms of human communication — older than spoken language — yet we hardly spend any time learning how to communicate with diagrams effectively. Change that.
Follow Frank Jacobs, who has been collecting “Very Strange Maps” online since 2009. Or browse his blog.
Follow the Oxford math professor Marcus du Sautoy, read his new book Thinking Better, or watch his (fascinating, but admittedly rambling) conversation on finding clever ways to take better shortcuts.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.- Albert Einstein

Explorers' Gym

Reaching Out to Bring Together

Invitations that reach out to diverse people and successfully bring them together around a topic of shared concern tend to follow certain principles:

They’re personalized.
They’re in your own voice.
They’re plain.
They’re an invitation, not an obligation.
They’re power-conscious. (Keeping a sense of obligation out of it can be hard to do when hierarchy is involved. Take an extra moment to think about how to invite them in a way that tries to set aside your power differences.)
They’re complete.

Premium Content

This week Chris spoke at an all-staff event for a large, complex organization that’s about to transform its whole structure to support a new way of doing business. Chris helped his audience – in this case, thousands of lawyers and scientists – improve their own meta-models for navigating change.

Watch Chris’ video journal.

The Journey Continues...

We have a social brain. It’s hard-wired with prehistoric intelligence for group success and group survival. But we’re probably not using it right.

Next time in BNW, we’ll help you explore the workings of this second brain and redesign your world to serve it better.

🙏 Thanks for bringing your energy here. - Chris and your NeueGeo team

Neue Geo

Brave New Ways #8 / A Four-Step Reality Check