The number of times I’ve ended a work day recently thinking that I had it figured out, only to learn by noon the next day that, no, I indeed did not have the thing figured out is more than I can count.
It’s been so often, and so strange, that I have felt like the right thing to do is wait … for clarity. There’s an onsite happening next week, and we’ll know then. There’s a meeting happening Wednesday, and we’ll have direction. My 1:1 with the boss is at the end of the week, perfect time to get on the same page.
And then the milestones come and go, and I'm no clearer than I was before. The onsite came. Wednesday came. The 1:1 happened. And I still can't say what's needed—what this is for, where it's supposed to land, whether it's even mine to figure out. And yeah the to-do list just got longer.
I'm calling this vertigo. The kind you experience in a whiteout: snow on the ground, snow coming down, snow swirling all around. You can't see the horizon. Direction has no meaning. And there's no map.
It isn't too little information. It's the loss of the reference point that lets information orient. Which is why more of it doesn't settle anything. You can learn everything there is to know about the situation and still not be able to say which way to move.
And at work, at least, the instinct is to freeze. To wait for direction.
Which makes sense, as I've thought about it, because part of me still believes someone up there has the map I need to make a move. The freeze is me waiting for them to hand it over.
And given the chats I've had with folks, there's a quiet throughline that if we just knew what was going on, or if people above us would just make some decisions, or if a new operating model would be declared, then things would be better.
But that map hasn't turned up. And it doesn't look to be coming either. And waiting, it turns out, isn't neutral. It gets noticed. (That's a story for another day.)
So let's turn to a poem.
No, I don't usually veer into poems to explain something about work. But I would more often if there were more poems written by Czech immunologists, inspired by war stories from Hungarian biochemists, translated into English by employees of the BBC's top-secret Monitoring Service during the Second World War … only to be used by pioneering organizational psychologists to explain concepts we use every day to figure out what's going on at work:
Albert Szent-Györgyi, who knew a thing about maps,
by which life moves somewhere or other
used to tell this story from the war,
through which history moves somewhere or other.
From a small Hungarian unit in the Alps a young lieutenant
sent out a scouting party into the icy wastes.
At once
it began to snow, it snowed for two days and the party
did not return. The lieutenant was in distress: he had sent
his men to their deaths.
On the third day, however, the scouting party was back.
Where had they been? How had they managed to find their way?
Yes, the men explained, we certainly thought we were
lost and awaited our end. When suddenly one of our lot
found a map in his pocket. We felt reassured.
We made a bivouac, waited for the snow to stop, and then
with the map
found the right direction.
And here we are.
The lieutenant asked to see that remarkable map in order to
study it. It wasn’t a map of the Alps
but the Pyrenees.
Goodbye.
Those soldiers waited, too. But they had a map. A shit map, yeah, the wrong mountains entirely—and still it saved them, because it got them moving.
That map inspired Karl Weick's koan: when you're lost, any old map will do.
Weick had a name for what those soldiers were doing: sensemaking. He established the theory of it—how people answer the question: what's going on here? And it kicks in at exactly the moment when the expected doesn't show, when the surprise lands, and the horizon disappears.
Every time a work situation becomes clear, it becomes clear afterward—when we look back at something already done and can finally say what it was. Which is why waiting for the right map is the wrong move.
We don't find the map and then walk. We walk, and the walking draws the map. That's how we make sense.
So I've been walking. I’m creating things that I have confidence in, but haven't done before. I’m sending emails and scheduling meetings that may have in the past felt like going outside of the hierarchy's norms. I’m trying different ways of working, like recording slide deck voiceovers and asking for feedback before something is finished. I'm asking questions that, you know, make my armpits sweat.
Is that progress? I think so? I'm learning. We're learning. Ask me in a month—it'll be clearer then. It always is.
When you're lost, any old map will do.