Accurate "Enterprise Map" Is A Trap?

There is a saying that "maps are not lost."

In order to understand the internal and external operation of enterprises, more and more sophisticated systems have been developed. We call them "enterprise maps", including enterprise strategic plans, sales forecasts and production quality reports.

With these precise "maps", business managers in the market are really flat, and do not lose their way?

Not really, it can be told from a little story.

The most popular map

In 1908, many tourists who took the London subway thought that getting lost in the subway is a common occurrence.

This is not surprising, because the subway system has more than 10 different lines, and is complicated and chaotic.

In order to make it clear, the head of the subway decided to issue maps to show people how to connect each line.

The new map was finally released in the loud voice of the whole city.

However, despite their great efforts, the map failed to achieve the expected success.

The reason is that London is not arranged according to the regular map coordinates, and the subway lines are built close to the winding streets, so the map, though accurately marked every corner of the street, looks as complex as a magnificent spaghetti, and the tagging of the landmark will only make the map more difficult to identify.

If you have been from London in the future, and now you want to go from Westminster to Paddington Station, it's no use to rely on this map to find the way.

On the whole, the map of London subway is accurate and complex, but it is nothing good at all.

The problem of map has been troubling managers until the 29 year old subway laid off worker Harry Beck discovered the crux of the problem.

He realized that people who use the subway map do not need to know where the subway is turning, nor do they want to know the exact distance between the two stations.

They just want to know how to get to the next stop from this station.

The people who take the subway need not a map of London, but a map of the subway.

In a small notebook, Beck simplified the entire London underground system into a nearly naive roadmap.

He replaced each route with a horizontal, vertical or 45 degree straight line.

In addition to simplifying the geometry of the Thames River, he cancelled all geographical landmark.

He equate the distance between the station and the station, whether the actual distance is 200 yards or 2 miles.

In addition, he enlarged the logo size of the city center, making many stations in London dense neighborhoods easier to identify.

In a few minutes, Beck turned the map of the world's most complex traffic system into a road map that even children could understand.

Nowadays, Beck's famous road map is one of the most popular maps in the world.

From Moscow to Tokyo, many places in the world use his map as a source of inspiration for designing his own city traffic map.

But this does not mean that the London subway map is flawless.

In order to simplify the route, the map was not plotted in proportion, which inevitably led to an illusion of London's appearance.

On Beck's map, according to your distance from the city center, the distance between the corner of the route and the distance between the two stations is often enlarged or reduced.

As a result, the distance between two seemingly near sites may take you more than 1 hours, while walking takes only 15 minutes.

On the contrary, the distance between the two adjacent sites far away from the city center may take you 1 days.

The map of Beck provides only one information, that is, if you want to go from Paddington to the Covent Garden Station, which subway line should you take?

However, it will not instruct you to specific information about any trail near Covent Park, nor will it indicate which restaurant is delicious, or is it the best way to take the subway?

That's because the design of Beck map has only one aim: to help tourists understand how to take the subway from one site to another.

That's all.

As a guide to the London subway, Beck map is like heaven and earth, but only if it wants to really "run" London, it is not enough.

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"Map" is not "territory".

In fact, human beings have great talent in pattern recognition.

We are born with the ability to accept large amounts of data and pform them into simple models, but sometimes we forget that the model is just a reality, not reality itself.

Reading old people's life experience does not mean that you are also getting older.

Analyzing some digital music players is not enough to help you design a MP3 for people.

Any attempt to capture reality through others' achievements will leave you missing a lot of situational information.

Once we consider how to process information in business operation, we will find this.

In the past 100 years, more and more sophisticated systems have been developed to understand the internal and external operations of enterprises.

Generally speaking, this is a good thing, but in fact one of the departments of a company often knows nothing about the work of another department.

Before people realize that enterprises need more management, the operation of the company is out of control.

Although the sale of a commodity will increase in some areas and in some other areas it will go down, but in the end, people will find that all the shops in the country are almost the same.

Because in addition to relying on some conventional beliefs and unreliable rumors, people can not find a better way to share information.

When the enterprise started real-time data integration and analysis, everything changed.

Operational experts have created an analytical system, such as inventories and supply chains, which can accurately predict future situations based on established information.

Now, when you buy a sweater in a shopping mall near your home, your purchase will produce a set of information that reflects how many dyes you need to prepare for dyeing the woolen fabric in Spain.

Some managers can learn some important information related to enterprises in a short time, including growth volume, market trend and productivity.

With these tools, they can have a holistic grasp of the operation of the company as a whole.

In this way, managers can make decisions on the basis of facts and break the magic of some stores.

Under the impetus of the information revolution, a large number of "maps" have been created, including enterprise strategic plans, sales forecasts and production quality reports.

Like Beck's map, these reports are abstract concepts.

But many enterprises are too dependent on these established models, so that they start to be divorced from reality.

Just as those who rely too much on the London subway map to give up more convenient walking and change to more time consuming subway, many companies have used the management strategy that accords with their own operation mode, but they are actually divorced from reality.

These facts based strategies are also used by many enterprises to process external data, that is, information about customers who purchase their products and services.

Enterprises have created some "map" market segments, research reports, and even some video clips to integrate information, trying to understand consumers' purchasing behavior, motivation and daily needs.

However, these maps are only a poor substitute for human behavior.

Once there is a lack of first-hand experience, the major decisions made by business managers will be divorced from the realities of reality.

More than one business leader complained to me that their companies always attract some smart and ambitious young people, but they lack a sense of intuition about their work.

A large number of survey data show that we may have created a whole generation of such marketing assistant.

They feel that as long as they have five great strategic plans on their PPT documents, they can prove that they have thoroughly enjoyed the job.

They forget that PPT is just an abstract concept, and that market strategy is just a map.

They know nothing about the real "territory".

Business is closely related to real life.

There are business opportunities everywhere in small and large shops, streets and alleys, and households.

Without direct communication with customers, enterprises lack the first-hand information and experience to make the right decisions, and the result is that many executives make hasty decisions when they have no personal experience in the actual layout.

Obviously, falling into the map.