the map is not the territory
expressionops culture
Korzybski's warning that representations are not the reality they describe - and confusing them has consequences.
The network diagram, the CMDB, the runbook: maps, drawn once, aging quietly while the territory drifts. Incidents love the gap - the documented topology says the link exists, the packets disagree. Trust the territory; audit the maps.
Korzybski's formulation is that a representation is not the thing it represents, and in operations the gap between them is where incidents live. The diagram, the inventory, the configuration management database and the documentation are all maps, and the network is the territory.
The gap opens continuously and invisibly. Someone adds a firewall rule during an outage and does not update the document. A server is decommissioned in reality and remains in the inventory. A dependency is added in code and appears in no architecture diagram. None of these are noticed, because the map is consulted when planning and the territory is encountered only when something breaks, which is exactly the wrong moment to discover they disagree.
The practical response is to derive the map from the territory rather than maintaining it in parallel. Discovery that scans rather than asks, configuration generated from the running state, and diagrams built from telemetry are all attempts to close the loop automatically, because any process that depends on a human remembering to update a document will drift. Where that is not possible, the second-best answer is to verify deliberately and on a schedule, and to treat any hand-maintained map as a hypothesis.