The Illegible Margin: Profiting From the Gap Between the Map and the Territory

The negative consequences of forcing the forests to become legible to their planners didn’t become obvious until after second rotation of trees to be planted, about a century later. This is important to note: the first-order effects, what happens right away, are often beneficial; it’s the second and third-order effects of forcing legibility onto an... See more

Instead of trying to shape the map to look like the territory, they tried to make the territory look like the map.

Legibility is a concept from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State . It’s not a book that lends itself well to one-sentence summaries, but my attempt is “we assume that only what we can measure is real and everything that is real can be measured.”

The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here ... See more

A core reason was that it was illegible , it was hard to measure. Who knew the collective five or fifteen minute chunks of people’s days added up to so much? 1

We live in an incredibly complex world; the territory is too vast for anyone to hold in their head and so we create maps, simplifications of reality to help us function.

However, sometimes a l... See more

For those willing to wade into messy, illegible reality and consider what exists outside their simplified maps, there is a reward awaiting you: the illegible margin.

Perhaps the key to finding the illegible margin is captured in Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Amos Tversky’s quip: “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

Because you’re looking for something which is hard to see, you have to have some sort of “tinkering budget” ... See more

Another example of the legibility margin is online publishers. Take Facebook as an example. If I told you that you had to start paying $50/year to use Facebook, would you give it up?

Many people probably would, or they never would have joined in the first place. Yet, that’s how much Facebook earns from your account.

They make around $48.76 per year p... See more

In the high modernist world we live in, we can adapt Drucker’s dictum that “whatever is measured improves” to a more true-to-reality, but less elegant “whatever is legible improves, unless there are second-order consequences which undermine or destroy the original intention.”

The reason I’ve just made you read a thousand words about trees (bet you didn’t think you were going to do that today) is that it illustrates the problems of taking a complex system and applying a simple process to it in order to optimize a single metric.

Which brings us back to business: there are a huge number of complex systems in a business, wh... See more