When the map replaces the journey, organisations get lost
Humans are arguably the best decision makers on the planet. AI might beat us on speed, data processing, and perhaps even certain cognitive biases, but evolution has made the human brain uniquely skilled at making perceptive judgements within messy, multidimensional complexity. In the modern world we ask a lot of ourselves; we need to make decisions in unprecedented uncertainty, and to be able to do that we need to make complexity understandable, otherwise we would never move forward.
In organisations we have many good ways of doing that. We find ways to measure things, and we make rules to follow. But by trying to make it easier to make difficult decisions – a process now accelerated by AI – we are losing the capacity to decide altogether, because we simply are not training the decision muscle. We can see it in our personal lives, and it is also a growing challenge in organisations, where we continue to get further away from the messy real world. With this article, we offer a perspective we expect to become increasingly important in the coming years as we navigate this shift.
Let’s move
As consultants, we spend our time helping clients navigate the world by making sense of messy problems. As storytellers and designers at IS IT A BIRD, we have done many projects where we make sense of lived reality and create frameworks, customer journeys, segments, and recommendations to help decision-making along.
We work in close collaboration with our clients, but even with great workshops, multimedia delivery, and challenging discussions, it can still feel like the experience falls a bit short. Recently, we have been sharpening our focus, moving well past simple ‘project deliverables’ to ask: What will really move people? What will support their capacity to make good choices?
Take me out to the ball game
Last year, IS IT A BIRD collaborated with a global sportswear manufacturer whose cross-disciplinary US-based team was preparing to work in a new European market and cultural context. The anthropological analysis we made was crucial – it made the implicit cultural reality explicit and shareable. But the magic happened when the team entered that situation themselves.
We spent days travelling the country, speaking to kids at the sidelines of small local clubs, being curious about fans at national games, drinking the beer and smelling the toilets from the hotdog stands. When we sat together, we debated what we were experiencing and how it felt, which assumptions were challenged for each of us, and the new perspectives that were emerging. By the end of the week, the whole group had a deep, colourful understanding of the context they would need to take all kinds of decisions about in the coming years. In the end, strategic choices that would usually be complex and heavily debated became easy. Not because we had simplified it, but because the team had built collective judgement. Same delivery, infinitely stronger ownership.
A theoretical punch to the gut
Hartmut Rosa is something of a rockstar in the world of social science, especially acclaimed for his work on resonance. He recently spoke in Copenhagen about his new book Situation und Konstellation, offering a distinction that has helped us understand exactly what was so impactful about that field trip.
Rosa distinguishes between situations and constellations. A situation is something we are in: complex and multidimensional, requiring intuition, experience, emotion, and judgement. A constellation is something we look at: neatly defined, measurable, organised, making ‘right choices’ clear to see. Playlists used to be a situation – reading the room, noticing your mood, and taking a risk. Now Spotify decides the vibe before we have felt it. In football, VAR makes millimetre-perfect calls but cannot consider the context of the specific game and what is fair in the moment.
According to Rosa, the agency we exert over a situation – when we are called on to engage with the messy reality and decide for ourselves what the right response is – is profound. It is in these moments we feel most human. Without them, we disengage; we lose energy, and we feel alienated. This insight feels huge, and sitting in that lecture it hit us like a punch to the gut. Life is interesting because the world can never be fully known or optimised, and the part we each play in engaging with the mess is one of the things that makes life meaningful.
Finding the (right) way
Rosa gives us a language for why the sportswear team got so much value out of that trip. They took responsibility for making their own judgements, rather than outsourcing advice. They immersed themselves in the situation so they could use their senses and experience to build their personal intuition, and that gave them a stronger muscle for decision-making, a sense of agency, and an even greater personal investment in the work.
Three ways to keep judgement in play:
1. Do not confuse clarity with judgement
Reports and frameworks can make choices clearer but cannot take responsibility for the choice. Are you using analysis to inform judgement, and where are you using it to avoid judgement?
2. Get close(r) to the situation
If the people making decisions are too far from lived reality, they will be overrelying on abstractions. When was the last time your leadership team directly experienced the world you are designing for?
3. Build collective judgement, not just alignment
Alignment can be agreement about a path ahead. Collective judgement is a shared sense of what matters and why. Do your teams understand the situation deeply enough to make good decisions when the framework does not cover their need?
These days it is tempting to let AI synthesise, organise, and define choices for us. But every time we outsource our senses and judgement, we miss an opportunity to train them. So, read the room, take a risk on the next song, get closer to the situation. AI can help us draw the map, but organisations need humans who know how to navigate.
If you are interested in getting closer to the mess, reach out to our team at IS IT A BIRD. You will now find us nested at Implement’s HQ in Hellerup.
Sources
Rosa, Hartmut. "The Atrophy of Discretion: A Plea for Human Agency." Lecture, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 17 April 2026.
Rosa, Hartmut. Situation und Konstellation: Vom Verschwinden des Spielraums. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2026.
