The New York Times recently had a great article featuring real stories of hapless drivers mindlessly following their GPS. Here are a few examples:
- “It kept saying it would navigate us a road,” said a Japanese tourist in Australia who, while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island, drove into the Pacific Ocean.
- A man in West Yorkshire, England, who took his BMW off-road and nearly over a cliff, told authorities that his GPS “kept insisting the path was a road.”
- In perhaps the most infamous incident, a woman in Belgium asked GPS to take her to a destination less than two hours away. Two days later, she turned up in Croatia.
- After a couple of Swedes mistakenly followed their GPS to the city of Carpi (when they meant to visit Capri), an Italian tourism official dryly noted that “Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn’t cross any bridge or take any boat.”
- And, in a more sobering tone, disastrous incidents of drivers following disused roads and disappearing into remote areas of Death Valley in California became so common that park rangers gave them a name: “death by GPS.”
Like the GPS, our worldviews also “program” us to think, act and react to events around us in certain ways, even when (as in the examples above) common sense would tell us we are way off course.
My friend Keith Webb describes driving on backcountry roads through beautiful French countryside; frequently stuck behind farm tractors on narrow, winding roads, he traveled slowly. His GPS told him he was still three hours away from his destination and thus late for an appointment. Thinking he could never arrive on time, he stopped for coffee and a croissant. When he started his car again, the GPS automatically reset itself and he immediately noticed it was set to avoid toll roads. A simple reprogramming of the GPS to include toll roads instantly offered a new route that was two hours faster!
Psychologists call this “second-order change”—change that intervenes from outside a closed system. “Second-order solutions are often viewed from within the system as unpredictable, amazing, and surprising, since they are not necessarily based on the rules and assumptions of that system.” (L. Michael Ascher, Therapeutic Paradox, 1989)
Keith’s GPS was a closed system. He intervened from outside the system (second-order change) to re-program it; when re-programmed, it offered unexpected and surprising results—the fast toll road he needed!
Each of us has a worldview which is our internal GPS system, guiding us through life. It is a cognitive map of reality.
Sometimes our GPS/worldview is faulty, as when racism is programmed into us by the environment we grew up in. Hopefully, we eventually realize that our racist worldview is taking us into thoughts or actions our conscience or common sense tells us are wrong. Our issue may not be racism, but all of us have something—some way our worldview is not connected with reality which then deceives us, like those GPS stories the New York Times shared.
From inside our worldviews, we easily assume our only options are tinkering with small adjustments or simply trying harder. Not often enough, perhaps, do we consider outside intervention—we need someone to help us “reset” our worldview that has been screening out important aspects of reality that we would otherwise miss.
Resetting our worldviews is often a wonderful gift! A parent, a teacher, a friend, a mentor, a colleague, a writer we’ve never met, or perhaps even (or especially) God, can offer it to us. It’s a lifelong process.
Question: Can you remember a time something or someone intervened to “reset” your worldview and you saw things differently? Please share it in a comment.
