Maps Are Models, Models Are Maps

Joe Macken spent the last 22 years building a scale model of New York City in his Queens basement. He never planned to exhibit it, but his passion project has become something of a New York landmark.

And no wonder. WOW. Just wow.

It’s freakishly impressive. But what compelled him to do it, you ask? And why do we find it so amazing, you ask? 

Probably for the same reason English model maker Philip Reed dedicated his life to obsessively building small-scale replicas of famous Royal Navy warships. He explains it very well in this video. To him, it’s almost a religious experience. The ship model somehow bridges the gap between the ship’s physical reality and the mental model he carries around in his head. Every mast, rope, and sail helps Reed understand the whole by recreating its parts. 

Maps do something similar. New York City is far too vast and complicated for anyone to comprehend in its entirety. So we shrink it. Flatten it. Simplify it. Joe Macken does it in three dimensions. Google Maps does it in two.

Maps are models. Models are maps. 

They give us simplified versions of reality that help us understand our landscape and decide where to travel next. 

That’s what humans do. We model.

When we buy a stock, we’re modeling a future in which a company becomes more valuable. 

When we pitch a startup to an investor, we’re asking them to believe in our model of a future that doesn’t exist yet. 

When we study history, we’re building models of the past to make better sense of the present.

We do it constantly because reality is too complicated to take in all at once. We need smaller versions of the world before we can decide how to move through the real one.

That’s what leadership is, really: model making. It means providing a model of how the world can be if people follow you. Sure, you may be proved wrong in the end, but that’s normal. As George Box says, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

So the next time you see a crazy guy online who seems to spend far too much time buried in his Legos, yeah, sure, he may be more obsessive than the average Joe, but don’t think what he’s doing is on the fringe of human affairs. It’s actually at the very center of it.