Leadership Must Correct the Pictures That Govern Perception

A governing body can make a damaging decision from accurate numbers. The dashboard may contain no fabricated data, yet its average hides one neglected location, its traffic-light threshold rewards delayed reporting, its organisation chart omits the people who carry informal authority, and its map makes a whole region appear peripheral. By the time leaders ask whether the picture was fair, money, attention and responsibility have already moved.

Institutions do not act upon reality without mediation. They act upon representations of reality: maps, reports, rankings, risk registers, financial statements, learner analytics, stakeholder matrices, photographs and stories. Each representation selects what can be seen, arranges what appears central and makes certain comparisons feel natural. It may be technically sound for one purpose and misleading for another.

Leadership must correct the pictures that govern perception. This is not a demand for a perfectly neutral image; no map or management model can preserve everything. It is a duty to state the purpose and trade-off, expose omissions and uncertainty, invite correction from people who know the terrain, and prevent a convenient representation from silently becoming the institution's truth.

On 4 September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution championed by Togo on behalf of the African Group that supports fairer and more accurate cartographic representation. The resolution promotes wider use of an equal-area world map such as Equal Earth…