A Letter from Chris Suarez
BREAKING NEWS: THE EARTH ISN’T FLAT
I feel very ready for 2023. Not ready because I’m certain how things will play out this year. Not ready because I have all my plans set and goals set and targets set. Not ready because the wind is at my back and the road is paved in front of me. But I feel very ready for 2023 because I trained for this. All of us trained for this.
2020 was training. And 2021 was training. And 2022 was training. My running coach has an expression that landed differently this morning as I heard it yelled. “The real world isn’t flat.” It was hill training day and he was mentally preparing me to get physically ready. Too often we can fall for the trap of preparing ourselves and training in perfect conditions. Perfect temperature. Perfect environments. Perfect equipment. Perfect flat roads and treadmills without adding any incline. Thus the yelling from the front: “The real world isn’t flat!!!”
When simulation becomes real life, we are surprised when hills show up, challenging courses present themselves, and less than perfect situations arise. We all will do well to acknowledge that the world isn’t flat. Training on flat roads, or logging hundreds of miles on the treadmill with no incline is just not real life. When we step outside and show up to “race day” we will be ill prepared. Our business is no different. Showing up when it is convenient and fits our life plans, running at the pace that we would choose, leaving the office at the time we planned to leave, and even practicing the ideal responses to the perfectly scripted objection - it all sounds pretty flat.
But the last couple of years have been anything but flat roads. We have been trained to deal with hills and detours and challenges.
Perhaps my greatest lesson this year has been to adopt mental models to make decisions with. These are models that we hang on our mental latticework in order to pull off and layer decisions on top of. These mental models come with a series of questions to ask ourselves, or lenses to look through, when we are faced with a fork in the road, a decision to make, or a challenge to face.
One of my favorite models to learn and internalize has been The Map Is Not The Territory. This mental model was created by Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski in 1931. Put simply even the greatest plan and the most clear strategy will be presented with some surprise. No map can perfectly represent every detail of the actual territory. It can help us explore, it can help us head in the right direction, it can help us move towards our destination, but it isn’t a perfect representation. The map in our hands or the GPS in our car doesn’t clearly define the elevations of the path in front of us. There may be completely new roads built, new neighbourhoods developed, new freeways engineered out in front of us that our map doesn’t clearly define. That is because maps are a representation, or a reduction, of what they represent. So your business plan is a representation or a map of what you will do, the results you will get, the challenges you have solved for. But the map is not the territory.
I am thankful for the map we have built out for 2023. I know what to do. I have a plan in place. I have the right partners along for the ride. And, we are also very clear that the map doesn’t represent every detail of every turn that will show up this year. The earth is not flat, and neither is our business. As we look back over the past few years, let’s call that practice. Let’s call that training. Let’s call that readying ourselves for the year ahead. Let’s go explore the territory that we are prepared to conquer.
Chris