Why collective illusion may beat collective ignorance

Consider this intriguing story (which may be apocryphal, but is still intriguing). Once upon a time, a small Hungarian army detachment manoeuvring in the Swiss Alps was lost in a snowstorm. The commanding officer, who had sent them out, suffered agonies over two days as he expected that the unit was lost and probably frozen to death.

On the third day, he was relieved to see them march back into camp. What had happened and why had they taken so long to come back? The unit had indeed been lost and had considered themselves done for and had waited for the end. And then, one of the soldiers found a map in his pocket.

This not only calmed them down and helped give them a sense of hope and purpose, but it also helped them discover their bearings after the snowstorm had abated. Using the map, they successfully found their way back to camp.

There is nothing extraordinary about the story so far. Expeditions without maps in novel territories do get lost. Finding a map (admittedly, somewhat miraculously, in this case) rekindles the group motivation to find a way back, and the map itself helps focus the collective efforts to return in the right direction. What is extraordinary about this story is that when the commanding officer examined the map that had saved their lives, he found that it was a map of the Pyrenees, not of the Alps!

We encounter expeditions (group projects) without maps (shared understanding) not only in the frozen wilderness of the Alps, but also in prosaic organisational settings. For instance, consider a team of specialists coming together for the first time to work on a consulting project. Apart from a general understanding of what the goal of the project is, when they begin there may be no shared understanding of how the expertise of each will be involved.