INSIGHTS
Map ≠
Territory
A field guide for institutions trying to govern, learn, and trade inside a living world.
The main reason that most institutions don’t achieve all of their goals isn't because they’re incompetent or have bad intentions. They fail because they’re faithful to and guided by the wrong map.
A policy unit optimises for “efficiency” and accidentally drains a river system of resilience. A university protects disciplinary standards and graduates’ students fluent in yesterday. A corporation perfects disclosure and still loses supply chains to heat, water stress, and ecosystem breakdown.
Same pattern, different uniforms. When what we think the world looks like differs from reality, that’s how models and proxies become conflated with the truth. It’s how the operational terrain becomes an alien landscape.
An uncomfortable fact that is often conveniently pushed into the background is that most professional organisations are stuck in a rinse and repeat cycle that they can’t break out of, but inertia isn’t just boring; it’s dangerous. Stagnant systems with models well past their used by date accumulate risk the eventually becomes unmanageable. Immersion within the system is the only way to increase the resilience of future operations. When maps are out of sync with the territory they describe, the costs build exponentially and usually in the most uncomfortable currency available: sudden financial pain, ecological collapse and erosion of public trust.
This is a kind of institutional bad faith: we hide behind roles, compliance, targets, and “that’s just how the system works” to avoid admitting we could choose differently. It is also a form of operational closure: each institution only “sees” the world through its own internal code - so the living world gets misread unless it’s translated into the system’s language. Emerdigm is a portmanteau of emerging paradigms and is built to break these codes. It exists to facilitate the shift from atomised to aligned.
This series is about how to de-risk your institution by moving from detached analysis to engaged stewardship, from inertia to immersion. Along the way, we’ll use three diagnostic lenses – the same ones that are featured in the Emerdigm platform – to help readers traverse the territory.
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Insights
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Let’s name the central omission.
Modern institutions are built on a narrow set of counted variables - revenue, GDP, jobs, shareholder return - while treating the living world as an “externality”: scenic background, free input, or inconvenient constraint.
But living systems are not a vibe. They are operating infrastructure for the services that keep economies relentlessly humming along: water regulation, pollination, soil formation, heat moderation, disease buffering, flood attenuation, cultural continuity. When these functions degrade, risk rises everywhere - budgets, insurance, asset values, social cohesion.
So here’s the reframing we’ll keep returning to:
Living Systems Integrity & Capacity (LSIC) is the condition of the living systems a place or organisation depends on—and their ongoing ability to keep doing their job. When LSIC is rising, your plans are being underwritten by a strengthening operating base. When its falling, today’s performance is being subsidised by depletion and partly burrowed from the future.
(Think of it as the difference between a business that reports profit while running down its machinery… and a business that maintains the machinery and stays profitable.)
The trap: when models become reality
In every sector, there are good reasons maps exist:
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We can’t hold the whole world in our heads
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We need shared language to coordinate action
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We need metrics to learn, compare, allocate.
Maps are essential. The problem is following them unquestioningly becomes addictive: when the metric becomes the mission; when what gets counted becomes what gets cared about; when a dashboard gives comfort while the system degrades outside the frame.
Here is a quick diagnostic question:
Which of your most influential decisions are made using information that excludes the living systems you depend on?
If the answer is “most of them,” then your institution isn’t just missing data. It’s missing reality.
Now let’s walk this pattern through three places where it matters most—government, academia, and corporate - and sketch what “updating the map” can look like.
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Who Owns the River? The Case for Systemic Stewardship
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The Tyranny of a Single Number
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What if a University Behaved Like an Ecosystem?
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