What Map Are You Using?
For years, I have kept an old, out-of-print book called The Atlas of Experience on a shelf in my office, where it stays both in view and within reach. It imagines human experience as a landscape. I think I return to it because it does what the best maps do. It gives shape to terrain we may have been moving through before we knew how to name it. It is a map of meaning: a way of understanding where we are, what we have been moving through, and what might be possible nex
“When we miss the maps people are using, we misread the terrain.”
It also reminds me that no place on any map is the whole story. We may be in uncertainty, grief, possibility, conflict, or change. We may recognize where we have been only after we have moved through it. And still, we are always moving.
I think about that often in our work at Future of Dialogue. In many of our experiences, we begin by orienting ourselves through a map. The map helps people locate themselves inside the conversation, and it opens a deeper question: what am I using to understand where I am?
Part of this work is learning to notice what a room is carrying before a conversation begins: the memory, expectation, trust, fatigue, and familiar patterns people have learned to enter. Once we begin to see that layer, another question opens. What map are other people using to make meaning of what is happening inside the room?
Here, map means the internal structure of meaning a person brings into any given room. It shapes what feels dangerous, what sounds reasonable, who seems trustworthy, what counts as evidence, and what kind of future feels possible.
What can look like division or disagreement is often people trying to navigate the same terrain with different maps. A proposal that sounds practical to one person can feel dismissive to another. A call for patience can sound wise to someone who trusts the process and unbearable to someone who has already waited too long. Words like safety, accountability, freedom, or belonging may appear to be shared while the map underneath it is entirely different.
This is why values work can be useful and still leave part of the terrain unseen. A group may name trust, courage, belonging, or accountability and believe common ground has been found. Those words offer only a beginning. And still, the deeper meaning of those words depends on the maps people are using. Trust may depend on whether someone believes people can be relied on, systems can be repaired, or harm is likely to repeat. Accountability may point toward repair in one map and consequence in another. Beneath the shared word are the often-unspoken assumptions people carry about what is real, what is possible, what can be trusted, and what kind of world they believe they are standing in. Those assumptions may never be named directly, and still, they shape the entire conversation.
When we miss the maps people are using, we misunderstand the terrain. People may explain more clearly. They may bring stronger evidence. They may make the case again with greater urgency. Sometimes that helps. Often, the gap lives somewhere else. The meaning of the information depends on the map being used to read it.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes in Hospicing Modernity that a map’s purpose is “not to represent something already visible,” but to surface what is “unconscious, invisiblized, and naturalized … in order to experience reality in a different way, intellectually, affectively, and relationally” (p. 105). That is the kind of map that matters here: one that helps people see what has already been shaping how they understand the room.
At Future of Dialogue, this means listening for the map that makes a position make sense: the assumptions beneath what people say, the meanings they attach to shared words, and the realities they may be trying to protect.
This is part of the discipline of Multarity Thinking®: creating conditions where multiple maps can become clear enough to work with, so people can understand what each map reveals, protects, and makes harder to see.
That kind of seeing can change a conversation. People may still disagree, and the hard thing may remain hard. The room has a truer place to begin because people are no longer responding only to positions. They are beginning to understand the realities those positions came from. And then they open themselves to the most useful questions:
What map am I using?
What map might everyone else in the room be using?
And what becomes possible when those maps can finally be seen together?
A group does not need one map handed down from above in order to move forward wisely. It needs enough honesty to see the maps already in the room. Because once we can see the map, we can begin to ask what it helps us understand, what it keeps us from seeing, and what we may be ready to redraw.
