The Pyrenees Map

In the winter of 1944, a small unit of Hungarian soldiers became lost during maneuvers in the Swiss Alps. The cold was severe enough to kill. For two days they remained in their tents, convinced they would die. On the third day, one soldier found a map in his pocket. The discovery galvanized the group. They studied the map, plotted a course, and marched with renewed confidence through the storm. They reached their base camp alive. The map, it turned out later, was a map of the Pyrenees—a different mountain range in a different country, hundreds of miles away. Karl Weick told this story repeatedly across his career because it captures the deepest and most counterintuitive property of sensemaking: plausibility matters more than accuracy in organizational life, because a plausible interpretation that enables coordinated action is more valuable, in the moment of action, than an accurate interpretation that produces paralysis. The map was wrong. It