Better Maps To Help You Get Lost

The boys had an out-of-town hockey tournament and, thanks to advanced online maps (Google Maps, Expedia Maps, MapQuest, and GPS) , ten out of fourteen parents made goofy travel mistakes.

Four got lost, taking wrong turns, taking nonsensical routes, and ending up in different towns as they meandered down snowy back roads on their way to Dinsmore, SK. Six got there either way too early, or way too late, having planned their travel based on the online estimates of travel time. Our Google Map predicted a two hour drive; it took a little over an hour. If we'd bothered to think about the actual mileage, we'd have realized the time was way off, but the tool presented Estimated Travel Time as the most prominent number, and we just went with it.

Now, most of these hockey parents are intelligent, capable people, yet we all relied on these amazing new tools, and we all failed to think. In ancient history, before 2005, we would have all had paper maps in the car. We would have looked at how many kilometers away Dinsmore actually is from Saskatoon, and planned our route and our travel time accordingly. We wouldn't have collectively ended up touring through Outlook and Milden. Now, without exception, we all trusted these expert tools to do our thinking for us, and in this case most of us got bad results.

We do this all the time in business, coming to blindly believe our information technology, our dashboards and reports, our visible numbers and the awards we win. It gets to the point that we stop thinking about what's really going on.

A recent StarPhoenix circular about Saskatchewan's Top Employers for 2011, cited "SIAST passes with flying colours", quoting a bunch of SIAST managers on how happy their employees are. At the same time, there's a bitter labour dispute going on and interviews of several SIAST instructors shows deep animosity and terrible morale. The SIAST leaders have awards and information that make them think they're heading to Dinsmore, but they're heading in the opposite direction and are probably going to miss the tournament.

Take the time to think, and if your tools start to mislead you, think about whether they're helping you or hurting.