Any map will do

This is the story of a reconnaissance group of soldiers lost in the Alps on a training mission. It was winter, they had no maps, and they seemed hopelessly lost. They were preparing to die, when one soldier found a map crushed down at the bottom of his pack. With the map in hand, they regained their courage, bivouacked for the night, and proceeded out of the mountains the next day to rescue. Only when they were recuperating in the main camp did someone notice that the map they had been using wasn’t a map of the Alps at all; it was a map of the Pyrenees.

This is the story to point out that sensemaking is an act of its own, valuable in itself, and independent of any notion of reality. This story raises the remarkable idea that, when you are lost, any map will do.

(Story from the papers of Professor Karl E. Weick)