Think back to the map of the world that hung on the wall at school. Most of us can still see it. Greenland sits up the top, enormous, looking about the same size as the whole of Africa.

Africa is around fourteen times bigger than Greenland. Australia is more than three and a half times bigger than Greenland too, even though that map never let us see it that way.

On 4 September the United Nations voted to do something about it. 164 countries backed a resolution asking governments, schools and technology companies to stop relying on that familiar map, known as the Mercator map, whenever the size of countries matters, and to use one that shows every country at its true relative size. The map at the centre of the campaign is called Equal Earth, and one of the three people who designed it is Bernhard Jenny, a cartographer at Monash University here in Melbourne.

The geography matters, especially to Africa. But the same thing happens to every one of us at work. We carry a picture in our heads of how things are, we make decisions based on that picture, and when we finally look at the reality behind it, it turns out to be something quite different.

A Good Map Used for the Wrong Job

The Mercator map was never a mistake. Gerardus Mercator drew it in 1569 for sailors, so they could plot a steady compass course across open ocean, which was what a navigator needed most. To make that work, the map had to stretch the land more and more the further it got from the equator, and for sailors that was a perfectly sensible trade.

The trouble came when the rest of us kept using it for something else. Over the centuries it became the way a lot of us picture how big, and how important, different parts of the world are. A tool built for one job ended up shaping how we think about a completely different one, and hardly anyone stopped to ask whether it was still the right tool.

Knowing Doesn’t Change the Picture

You’d think that once we know the map stretches things, we’d simply adjust in our heads. We don’t. Nature recently reported on research showing that people reading a map don’t correct for its distortion, even when they know the distortion is there. The picture we’ve looked at for years wins over the fact we’ve just been told.

Organisations work exactly the same way. There’s the picture of who our customers are, the picture of where our money really comes from, the picture of what our people want from work and the picture of how long a job actually takes. Most of those pictures were accurate once. They were drawn for a particular moment and a particular decision, and then the moment passed, the business moved on and the picture stayed on the wall.

Last week I wrote about Australia’s housing shortage, and how we still talk as though we’re running out of room. We’re not. We’re one of the emptiest developed countries on earth, and what we’re really short of is the infrastructure that turns land into somewhere people can live. It’s the same trap. We’ve got a picture of the country that doesn’t match the country, and it’s still steering the whole argument.

Why We Hold On

This is where PTFA comes in. It’s my shorthand for Past Trauma, Future Anxiety, the weight that our past and our worries about the future put on the decisions we make today.

The old picture is something we learnt early, lived with for years and made plenty of good decisions with. It feels like knowledge, and it’s close to our hearts. So when someone puts a new picture in front of us, our first instinct is to defend the one we already have. And the more uncertain things feel, the tighter we hold on, because what we once knew is a comfortable place to make decisions from.

Where It Ripples

A picture in someone’s head doesn’t stay in their head. It travels into where we look for growth and where we never think to look. It shapes who we hire, what we build, which customers we chase and which ones we slowly stop serving. And it shapes how we think about the future, because every plan starts from where we believe we’re standing today. If that starting point is out, everything we build on top of it carries the same error.

For Africa this is anything but abstract, and I’ve written about it twice. Of today’s hundred largest cities, only 24 will still be growing by 2100, and twelve of those are in Africa, which is why I called it the urban gravity shift last month. Two years earlier I wrote about the African Era, and why I think the continent becomes one of the great economic stories of this century. If the Africa in your head is the one from the classroom wall, you’ll be slow to every decision that follows, and someone working from a more current picture will get there first.

What I’d Do Next

This is one of the easier things in an organisation to test, and it doesn’t cost anything.

Before your next leadership meeting looks at a number that matters, ask everyone in the room to write down what they think it is. It might be how many of your customers are under 35, or how much of your revenue comes from your ten biggest clients. Then put the real figure up. Nobody needs to feel embarrassed by the gap, because the gap is the most useful thing you’ll learn all day. It shows you the picture your people have actually been making decisions with.

Then take a lesson from the UN. It didn’t ask the world to remember that Greenland is smaller than it looks. It asked people to change the map. Telling your team that their picture is out of date won’t shift it, for the same reason it doesn’t with maps. Changing what they look at every day will, whether that’s the slide that opens every strategy day, the dashboard on the wall or the numbers new staff are shown in their first week.

The World Didn’t Change Size

Africa, Greenland and Australia are exactly as big as they’ve always been. What changed on 4 September is that most of the world agreed it was time to look at them properly.

Every leadership team has its own version of that school map. The question is which picture you’re still making decisions from, and when you last checked it against the world outside.

If this is landing close to home for your organisation, I work with leadership teams and boards on exactly these kinds of decisions: what the signals mean, what the ripple effects are, and what to do before the moment becomes a crisis. Get in touch.

Choose Forward.