Originally published on LinkedIn on October 2, 2017
An updated version of a piece I originally published in 2017, co-written with Chris Kutarna, author of “Age of Discovery”. Nine years later, the argument has only become more urgent, and the maps more in need of redrawing.
The world always makes sense. But it doesn’t always make sense to us. What we see depends on how we look at it. Surprise, a constant theme in boardrooms, in capitals, and in living rooms, is a sign that whatever perspective we’ve been using to see the world no longer shows us things as they really are.
It is when the world stops making sense to us that we need a new map, a new narrative that better represents reality. But coming up with one, and making it stick, is not easy. Consider this: in the early 1500s, Copernicus taught us that the Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. We’ve lived with this insight for 500 years. Why, then, do we still gather at the waterfront to watch the “sunset”?
The reality, as any photograph from the International Space Station would make clear, is “earthspin.” We, not the sun, are traveling across the sky to turn day into night. But that simple, centuries-old truth hasn’t yet penetrated our language. It hasn’t yet penetrated our thinking. Every “sunrise” and “sunset” should be a powerful reminder that our everyday narratives can warp and distort our ability to see things as they really are.
Our “maps” of the world exist mainly in the language, or narratives, we use to frame concepts and issues. Words are just the shared mental maps we use to navigate through the world. Leaders steeped in conventional strategy may be skeptical of the power of mental maps, or narratives, to shape understanding of industries, problems, or priorities. But consider how the multiplication of information has diminished leaders’ capacity to articulate the world to themselves, often forcing them to become consumers of other people’s narratives. We may talk about “disruption” in our own industries because that is the narrative being passed around, but what we mean when we use it remains fuzzy to ourselves and others. And when the map is fuzzy, so are the actions that follow.
When I first co-wrote a version of this piece in 2017, we argued that map-making, or map-remaking, is an essential activity when steering an organization during times of rapid change. Nine years later, we are not merely in a time of rapid change. We are at what Carlota Perez would call an inflexion between techno-economic paradigms, a moment when the rules that governed the previous era are visibly fraying and the rules of the next one have not yet been written. The narratives we inherited from the Information Age, narratives about disruption, about software, about the primacy of bits over atoms, are actively misleading us. They are not just outdated. They are dangerous because they conceal the very terrain we most urgently need to navigate.
In such moments, the ability to draw new maps is not just useful. It is a competitive imperative, an institutional imperative, and, for societies navigating great transitions, an existential one.
Renaissance Wisdom on Mapping New Worlds
In other periods of rapid change, the ability to create new maps separated those who adapted successfully from those who were paralyzed by the pace of change. The Renaissance, an analogous moment of transformation driven by globalization (the voyages of discovery) and a revolution in information technology (Gutenberg’s printing press), offers vivid examples. How people saw the present, their narrative, drove their adaptations and led their transformations.
From flat maps to globes. The first successful Atlantic empire-builders, Spain and Portugal, switched from modelling the world as flat to modelling it as spherical, not because they suddenly discovered that the world was round (Europe had known that since the time of Ancient Greece), but to better visualize crucial business questions. The oceans to Europe’s east and west had both been proven navigable, and in 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas drew a single vertical line to divide the lands beyond Europe between the two countries. But in whose territory did the economically significant Spice Islands lie, on the other side of the globe? And which way was the shortest route to getting there? Visualizing the Earth as a sphere helped clarify and answer those strategic questions.
From sacred to inspired art. Medieval art was flat and formulaic. Its main purpose was religious, to tell a sacred story. Plagiarism was common practice; innovation was irreverent. The invention of linear perspective, plus new knowledge in anatomy and natural science, were absent from European art until Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, da Vinci, and others validated them within a new narrative: the artist’s job was to capture a fragment of God’s creation as he saw it. These artists became famous for works that presented increasingly lifelike, original, and secular visions of the world.
From luxury to mass medium. Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press in the 1450s, ended life bankrupt. Why? Because books were a luxury, useful to few, owned by even fewer, and the economics of Gutenberg’s printing press made sense only in large-volume runs. Gutenberg struggled to find books that demanded mass production. But over time, the new printing technology helped change people’s ideas about books and the purpose they could serve. By the 1520s, when Martin Luther directed all laypeople to read the Bible as a way to care for their own souls, books were becoming the new medium in which ideas reached mass audiences. The Bible has since been printed over 5 billion times. The technology was not the revolution. The new mental map, the narrative that books were for everyone and not just for elites, was.
The common thread across all three examples is that a new capability did not automatically produce a new world. What produced the new world was a new narrative about what the capability meant and what it made possible. The gap between the emergence of a capability and the emergence of an adequate narrative around it can last decades, even centuries. We are living in such a gap right now.
It’s Time to Update Our Narratives
In 2017, I proposed three narrative shifts: from infrastructure to intrastructure, from mechanical to biological thinking, and from automation to augmentation. Some of these have aged well. Some have not gone far enough. And the world has moved on in ways that demand altogether new maps. Here are three narratives in urgent need of redrawing.
From “disruption” to construction. For over a decade, “disruption” has been the dominant narrative of innovation. It frames progress as the act of tearing down incumbents, disaggregating value chains, and making existing players obsolete. It is the narrative of the Information Age, and it served that age well: Uber disrupted taxis, Netflix disrupted Blockbuster, Airbnb disrupted hotels. The playbook was clear. Build a platform. Aggregate demand. Let software do the heavy lifting.
But the defining challenges of our time, decarbonizing energy systems, rebuilding supply chains, scaling new materials and new biology, are not problems of disruption. They are problems of construction. They require building new physical infrastructure, not just new apps. They require mastering manufacturing, not just marketing. They require patient capital deployed over decades, not growth hacking deployed over quarters.
The disruption narrative makes leaders look at the world and ask: “What can we unbundle?” The construction narrative makes them ask: “What do we need to build, and how do we build it at scale?” These are profoundly different questions, and they lead to profoundly different organizations, investment strategies, and talent requirements. When Packy McCormick argues that we are standing at the foot of a “Techno-Industrial Revolution”, he is pointing to precisely this shift: the frontier of value creation has moved from software platforms to integrated systems that fuse intelligence with physical production. Companies like SpaceX, which builds and launches its own rockets, or Anduril, which designs and manufactures its own defense hardware, are not “disrupting” their industries in the classic sense. They are constructing new industrial systems from scratch, vertically integrated, AI-powered, and designed for scale from day one.
The disruption map tells you the world is about to be taken apart. The construction map tells you it is about to be rebuilt. These two maps lead to very different destinations.
From “software eats the world” to software meets the world. Marc Andreessen’s famous 2011 dictum that “software is eating the world” became perhaps the most influential mental map of the past fifteen years. It was a powerful narrative, and for a time, a largely accurate one. Software platforms did reshape media, retail, finance, and transportation.
But the narrative also produced a massive blind spot. As Nicolas Colin has observed, the Information Age doubled down almost exclusively on the automation of mental labor, optimizing coordination, logistics, and knowledge work, while letting the physical side of the economy atrophy. We got extraordinary tools for managing supply chains that spanned the globe, but the supply chains themselves remained fragile. We got algorithms that could predict demand with uncanny precision, but the factories that fulfilled that demand operated on processes largely unchanged since the mid-twentieth century.
The result? In the world of bits, we saw explosive growth and deflation. In the world of atoms, we got stubborn inflation and stagnation. Peter Thiel famously captured the dissonance perfectly: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
The new map is not “software eats the world.” It is software meets the world, the convergence of digital intelligence and physical production. This is what happens when AI does not merely optimize spreadsheets but designs molecules, when simulation does not merely model a factory but becomes the factory’s first and most important instantiation. The companies that will define the coming decades are those that master this convergence: using computation and data not as a layer on top of physical operations, but as the foundation from which physical systems are conceived, designed, built, and continuously improved. That is a fundamentally different map from the one Silicon Valley has been using for the past two decades.
From automation to symbiosis. In 2017, we argued for a shift from “automation” to “augmentation,” the idea that AI’s greatest potential lay not in replacing humans but in amplifying what humans could do. That argument remains true, but it no longer goes far enough.
The automation narrative framed the question as a zero-sum contest: humans versus machines, with jobs as the stakes. The augmentation narrative improved on this by pointing to the human-machine interface as the key opportunity space. But what we are witnessing today, with AI systems that can reason, generate, and act across complex domains, demands an entirely new narrative: symbiosis.
Symbiosis is not about humans using tools, nor about machines replacing workers. It is about integrated systems in which human judgment and machine intelligence are so deeply intertwined that the distinction between “the human part” and “the machine part” becomes meaningless. A scientist working with an AI system to explore millions of molecular configurations is not being “augmented” the way a craftsman is augmented by a power drill. The scientist and the AI are co-creating in a shared problem space that neither could navigate alone. The AI brings combinatorial reach and tireless computation. The human brings intuition, context, ethical judgment, and the ability to ask the right question.
This shift has profound implications for organizations. If the old map was about optimizing labor costs, and the augmentation map was about improving individual productivity, the symbiosis map is about redesigning the entire operating system of the organization. Decision-making becomes the core skill, not production. Judgment, not output, becomes the bottleneck. As AI takes over more of the “Orient” and “Act” phases of the classic OODA loop, humans are pushed toward “Observe” and “Decide,” the evaluation and judgment work that our current tools, processes, and training pipelines are not optimized for.
The automation map asks: “Which jobs will be eliminated?” The augmentation map asks: “How can each person become more productive?” The symbiosis map asks: “How do we design organizations where human judgment and machine intelligence create something neither could alone?” That last question is the one that matters now.
Cartography as Competitive Imperative
Much has been written about the overwhelming amount of data and information now available to leaders. What is often missing in this discussion is that the main challenge does not lie in having too much information (our brains are always flooded with more information than we can process), but in the information overflow that occurs when we lack an apt framework to make the flood meaningful.
Map-making is an essential, but mostly overlooked, part of navigating great transitions. As the example with the sunset shows us, narrative and language can indeed trap us in outdated views of the world. We must gain awareness of our mental maps, and redraw those that need redrawing, if we want the world to make sense to us again.
This is not just a corporate leadership imperative. It is a civilizational one. Europe, grappling with what Mario Draghi has called its competitiveness crisis, cannot solve its problems with the mental maps of the Information Age. The same goes for any country, institution, or company trying to navigate the transition from an age dominated by bits to one defined by the convergence of bits and atoms, from an age of disruption to an age of construction, from an age where software ate the world to one where software must learn to build it.
Five hundred years after the Renaissance, we remember Columbus, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and Gutenberg not because they had the best technology of their time, but because their maps defined the terrain in which their age explored. Today’s great transition is likewise unveiling a new world to us. New maps, new narratives, will emerge and will define how we understand it.
If we are not drawing them, someone else is. The “Neo-Industrial” Substack has been born in an attempt to craft a new narrative around this new “Age of Construction”: the narrative of the Neo-Industrial Age.
Love this, Massimo. Whenever I hear “the world is so complex these days”, I let out a little sigh. The world has always been, and will always be, perfectly in order and infinitely complex. Human-made systems exist to simplify it. This is not a new perspective, it’s systems theory from the 1960s. I hope it makes a comeback. Trying to articulate a little piece of this in my Substack.
See you around the Kiez! 😊