Who controls your Cognitive Map?

“..elites in a society typically maintain their power not simply by controlling the means of production (ie money), but by dominating the cultural discourse too (ie a society’s intellectual map). And what is most important in relation to that cognitive map is not what is overtly stated and discussed — but what is left unstated, or ignored. Or as he wrote: “The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than a complicitous silence.”

Quote from FT article on 20th August 2009 by Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett is chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times. She is also a Social Anthropologist by training and one of the very few people I have heard link that area to Leadership and Business. The article linked above is a telling story which can help us understand how we got into such a global financial crisis around that time.

She has often referred to this around the idea of “controlling the cognitive map”. I recommend reading around the concept of how we construct out intellectual or cognitive maps both as individuals and societally.