The benefit of getting lost.
What if we're using the wrong maps?
There is an apocryphal story in Miroslav Holub’s poem “Brief Thoughts on Maps,” first published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977. It tells of a small unit of Hungarian soldiers on manoeuvres in the Alps who get lost in a snowstorm and assume they’re doomed, until one of them finds a crumpled map in his pocket. Morale returns, they organise themselves, navigate, and eventually make it back to base. Only afterwards does the lieutenant realise that the map isn’t of the Alps at all but of the Pyrenees.
If you’ve ever been lost in the fog—or the dark—you’ll know that a map is only of real use once you can establish some landmarks. Unless, of course, you’re using GPS, in which case you’ll just follow the bouncing ball, even if it takes you over a cliff.
A map gives us confidence that we’re in known territory.
The map, though, as Alfred Korzybski famously pointed out, is not the territory.
Your resumé is a map; so are your qualifications, and the organisation chart of the place you work. They were drawn in the past, and are only totems when it comes to what is really happening. There is no data, and no maps, for where we’re going. Like the Hungarian soldiers, we’re navigating on false assumptions.
They were lucky. Luck is fickle.
And I think, whether we like it or not, that’s where most of us are. As increasingly capable technology bites and seeps into areas we once thought our qualifications had made safe, it is the parts of us that qualifications cannot reach that matter. Corporate cultures and software have created a learned helplessness within us, such that as the boundaries of uncertainty close in, we seek permission from others in search of certainty. We would rather do what we know to be wrong with permission than do what is right and face the consequences. It’s understandable when we have little skin in the game—when we’re working for others we do not know, as part of a process within a bigger process. We follow the map we’re given.
One of the pleasures of my life is that I get to work with people whose work defies the maps of detailed job descriptions, and whose qualifications reflect only a tiny part of their qualities. Whilst they may be highly qualified in a specialism, you could drop them into any environment as leaders and they would thrive. They are people who make maps for others and spend their time where those different maps meet.
Those people matter, because one of the things we rarely pause to consider is how much of our confidence depends on believing we’re all using the same map. For most of history, that was something of a given: whether or not it really described the terrain, it was shared. Nations, institutions, and cultures provided the contours, and we moved within those bounds.
That’s changing. Technology, conflict, and the torrent of information have splintered the landscape. We’re still searching for landmarks, but we’re doing it with entirely different maps, some printed in ink, others glowing behind glass, and others held in our heads.
Increasingly, it’s not just that we’re lost. We’re lost in ways that don’t connect. We don’t see contour lines; we see trenches. The result is that we look for warriors when what we need are diplomats. Those whose loyalties are clear but who are also able to embrace the ideas and landscapes of others. Those who can see paths through the trenches. People who recognise that fear takes us to conflict when what we need is collaboration.
There’s something in this fractured landscape that Machiavelli might recognise. In The Prince, he offered counsel to a leader in uncertain times, surrounded by shifting alliances and unreliable information. It’s easy to read him as a strategist of power, but underneath, he’s writing about survival, about what to do when the terrain under your feet keeps shifting.
Today, though, it’s not just leaders or princes who face that uncertainty. It’s all of us. We sit between territories; cultures, technologies, generations, trying to act with integrity when every map we’re handed contradicts the next. We no longer have the luxury of a single centre of power to stabilise us. Instead, we must all become diplomats, moving between worldviews, translating perspectives, and listening for the shape of the landscape others see.
That is where leadership lives now; not in domination, but in translation; not in winning territory, but in stitching together understanding across it. We are all Machiavelli’s prince: wary, adaptive, perched between competing claims, re-learning the craft of presence.
In leadership terms, Machiavelli spent his career shadowing people like Cesare Borgia and taking very good notes. He wasn’t theorising from a distance; he was watching how power moved through the world and trying to make sense of it.
I wonder if that’s not a lesson for today. In a world with few agreed maps, every one of us is a prince of sorts, caught between competing forces, making choices in the fog. We don’t have to be a CEO to know what it’s like to navigate shifting alliances, to balance risk and virtue, or to act before we’re ready. Like Machiavelli, we can decide to look closely at what’s happening around us, learn from it, and write our own playbook. It’s not about cynicism or scheming. It’s about seeing clearly, listening deeply, and keeping notes, because in the end, it’s often the quiet observers who chart the new routes others will one day follow.
So stop looking for leaders. Look for diplomats. And if you can’t find one, become one.
.I’m exploring these ideas further at the athanor. If you can feel your inner Machiavelli stirring, if you like the idea of heresy, and if you want to look at things differently, pay it a visit.
Excellent 🌿