By using this practical cognitive technique, human beings have learned about life and survived on their own even in new and unfamiliar situations. A primitive example of this knowledge transference is the lesson most of us learned at a very young age about fire. We were told not to touch it because it was hot. Fire hurts! Most of us heeded that advice. Furthermore, if we happened to get burned inadvertently, the accident did something very important for us. It reinforced our knowledge that fire is hot and it will burn and hurt if we touch it. Since we don’t enjoy pain, we created a mental map about fire and avoided touching it. Now, as adults, we make decisions about fire based on our past orientation.
The “Mental Map Matrix,” illustrates how we use mental maps. While the human decision-making process includes an incalculable number of variables, this simple model shows how we continue to create new mental maps and reinforce old ones. It starts when something happens to us or we experience a new event (box 1). The first thing we do is instantaneously scan our memory for any similar experiences (box 2). Generally at a subconscious level, we ask, “Have I had an experience like this?” (box 3). In most cases, especially as we get older and have more life experiences behind us, we’ll identify some experience that resembles the current situation. If we do, we then try to remember the outcome: “Was it successful for me?” (box 4). This is an internal value judgment. We make this judgment based on our psychology and personality at that moment in our life. Most likely we judge “success” by whether the outcome got us what we needed. If we judge the previous outcome to have been successful, we’ll duplicate the behavior (box 5) to match our mental map and will expect a similar outcome. The aftermath of the experience reinforces our mental map (box 6) as the “right” reaction to that experience.
Let me illustrate the power of a closed paradigm. I once worked with the director of a regional telephone company to help establish a self-managed group of technicians responsible for telephone service repair in a western state. The managers who reported to the director were initially reluctant to try a self-managed group because they thought their employees were lazy and would take advantage of a selfmanaging environment. But a nine-month trial demonstrated that the self-managed team was more productive and did higher quality work than the traditional work team with a supervisor. In fact, the self-managed team completed a greater number of repair calls and had a lower rate of repeat visits. With these impressive results, I expected the organization to embrace the new method and expand its use.