Article by Julian Norris: “A lot of organizational systems thinking has become overly attached to its own representational devices. Causal loop diagrams, systems maps, stakeholder networks, iceberg models, adaptive cycles, and so on. These are useful instruments, but they can become reified. People start treating the map as the territory, and the analytical representation as an adequate substitute for the experience of the phenomenon.
When we ‘map’ or otherwise describe complex reality, we use language, symbols and metaphors. We might begin with mathematical representation, but as soon as we start using words like ‘order’, ‘instability’, ‘complexity’ or ‘attractor’ – they enter a domain of social description and start to carry all kinds of additional cultural meaning and linguistic associations.
And every map rests on a mapping platform that is much more than just a background grid. It’s a crystallized worldview. It decides what counts as a unit, which directions matter, which cycles are primary. Such platforms tend to encode our understanding of the natural world and the nature of our relationship with it. They make some questions answerable and others un-askable. For example, as David Krakauer reminds us, highly symmetrical platforms don’t just struggle to represent complexity – they struggle to detect it in the first place.
If every map is a worldview, we need a way to think about how maps make meaning in the first place. Not just what they show, but how they help us see at all. For that I’m going to lean on the work of anthropologist Roy Wagner and use his ideas as a handrail.
Wagner spent years working with the Daribi people in Papua New Guinea and in The Invention of Culture (1975) and Symbols That Stand for Themselves (1986) he elaborated a theory of metaphor. Most of us were taught that a metaphor is decoration – a colourful way of saying something that could be said plainly. Wagner argued the reverse. A metaphor – he preferred the word trope – is a form of perception.
When you use the classic iceberg model to describe some organizational dynamic, you aren’t just describing the phenomenon. You’re collapsing two worlds into a single image, and the image lets you see something you couldn’t see before. Wagner called a good trope “too definite for words.” It isn’t vague. It’s more precise than any paraphrase, which is why the iceberg needs no explanation in a room. People just get it.
I find three of Wagner’s ideas useful to hold here.
Tropes come in orders. A first-order trope is a single image: the iceberg, the tree. A second-order trope is metaphor spread out – a sequence in which each image transforms the one before. Wagner called this process obviation. It’s a subtle process of contextualization and transformation in which the earlier image doesn’t simply disappear; its meaning is altered by the subsequent image. A third-order trope draws in the perceiver…the image through which we see ourselves seeing…(More)”.
