The suitcase is unpacked. The map is still open.
I started writing this email at an airport in Croatia, bags packed, boarding pass open, about to begin the long trek home.
There is a particular feeling that arrives at the end of a trip. You stand in a departure lounge with a head full of things you saw and a life waiting for you that has no idea any of it happened.
I'm playing with this idea of Return Flight Theory.
You leave with one map of the world. You come back with a bigger one. Old towns you had never walked. Conversations you didn't expect. A different sense of scale and time and how other people live. The map in your head expands while you are away.
Then you fly home to a life that stayed exactly the same size.
I am home now, navigating re-entry.
The suitcase is unpacked. The washing is done. The calendar has reclaimed its usual authority. Familiar streets require less attention and familiar systems ask fewer questions.
Already, I can feel the map beginning to fold along its old creases.
Travel brings your attention fully online. You read the room more carefully. You watch how things work. You notice signals that would disappear into the background at home. Ordinary things require thought because the operating system is unfamiliar.
Leadership can become deeply familiar.
Seniority gives you experience, judgement and a larger context window. It can also fill that window with increasingly familiar information.
The language is familiar. The machinery is familiar. Information arrives compressed into dashboards, briefing papers and carefully prepared conversations. People anticipate your questions. Your expertise has currency in almost every room you enter.
Unfamiliar territory changes the inputs.
A different country can do that. So can a different industry, a conversation outside your usual circle or direct experience of something you have previously only understood through a report.
Perhaps it is a room where your title carries little weight. A technology you cannot yet translate into your existing strategy. A market moving at a pace that makes your assumptions feel dated. A customer whose experience sits well beyond the averages in your dashboard.
You pay closer attention. Your assumptions become easier to see. The territory gets bigger.
This is the part of Return Flight Theory I keep thinking about.
A larger map needs to change something once you return. Otherwise, it gradually becomes a collection of stories about the trip.
“The map is not the territory.”
Every leader operates from a map built through experience. Leadership asks us to keep discovering what that map leaves out. Unfamiliar territory is one way we update it.
So I am sitting with this as I re-enter everyday life:
What will I change while the larger map is still open?
The suitcase is now repacked for a quick trip to Sydney this week where I am running an all day Masterclass on Creating Capacity at the Corporate PA Summit.
The map is still open.
Meredith
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