Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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Bringing Order to Magnitude
Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].
So vast and diverse was the kingdom he ruled that the Emperor instructed his College of Cartographers to prepare a map that would render, in perfect detail, every feature that his empire encompassed. To meet this desire, the cartographers prepared a map of a single province in such detail that its scale completely covered an entire city. But the Emperor was not satisfied. So the cartographers next prepared a map of the Empire whose scale was such that it completely covered an entire province. But the Emperor was still not satisfied. So the cartographers toiled to create a universal map of the Empire whose scale was so exact that it completely encompassed, point for point, every province and every city, so that eventually map and Empire were indistinguishable, one from the other, and each became one and the same.
My paraphrase of a parable--Del rigor en la ciencia, written by the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges--takes the concept of scale to an absurdly, logical extreme. What the Emperor’s cartographers pursued with zealous diligence was complete verisimilitude between what was measured and what was represented. But in achieving absolute unity, at a scale of 1:1 the perfection of exactitude--of getting it exactly right--collapses into redundancy.
The value of a 1:1 scale map is rendered null when all one has to do is inspect the very location itself …
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"To generalize is to be an idiot." - William Blake |