Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Change Leaders

4    ‘The map is not the territory’

Reframing change leadership

Introduction

NLP is ideally suited to enabling conscious change leadership because it is broadly based on social construction processes. The philosophy that underpins conscious change leadership is that ‘The map is not the territory’ which basically means all our perceptions are simply maps of a potential reality rather than actual reality – and imperfect maps at best. This is known as an interpretivist ontological position. Ontology is defined as the nature of being (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). The contrast to the interpretivist position is the positivist position which assumes that reality is accessible in an objective sense and can be measured and underlying principles can be identified ...