On September 12th, 2012 technology giant Apple announced it’s long anticipated iPhone 5, the newest model of the iPhone, the most popular smart phone in the world. A week later, Apple released the final version of its IOS 6, the latest version of the operating system that enables the iPhone as well as a host of the company’s other popular electronic gadgets, including the iPad and iPad, to serve up their high-tech goodness.
Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, who had replaced their founder, the late Steve Jobs almost a year to the day of the day had decided to replace Google Maps, the mapping and navigation system that the iPhone had used with its own, newly developed Apple Maps. The decision was widely regarded by the business community as driven by its increasingly furious completion with search giant Google.
Apple provides automatic software updates via the Internet to all its various electronic devices and within a matter of days, more than 50% of all the more than million iPhones had received their iOS 6 upgrade, and their users found that their Google Maps replaces by Apple Maps as the information source for all their navigation tasks. Unfortunately, there were some problems.
Here is how David Pouge described some of these problems in a New York Times article five days after the Apple Maps launch.
Last week, I used Apple’s new Maps app on my iPhone to guide me to a speaking engagement.
The GPS navigation screen was clean, bold and distraction-free. The voice instructions spoke the actual street names. The prompts gave me just the right amount of time to prepare for each turn.
There was only one problem: When the app told me that I had arrived, I was sitting in a random suburban cul-de-sac. Children were playing in the front yard, the sky was a crisp blue, and I was late for my talk.
Humans among all of the earth’s myriad creatures are gifted with the ability to develop, on the fly complex maps and models to guide through life. However, this gift also provides us with some of our thorniest problems.
These problems arise when the world around us changes but we continue to use our old mentally constructed, which no longer represent the way things are accurately.
As long as we continue to rely on the old map, we have a hard time getting our bearings. We have no way of knowing which parts of the map are still accurate and which ones should be ignored.
We become like the many iPhone users, who found themselves on a trip, relying on their trusted gadget to guide them.
Our beliefs and belief systems can become like these no-longer-useful maps. Our habit patterns make giving up beliefs that have worked long time difficult There become times when it would be much better to drop the old map, give up the old belief and find our way without one. The failure to do so can lead to costly mistakes.
As we move move through life and accumulate more firmly entrenched beliefs, these may prove harder to give up. The ability to adapt to new information is the essence of learning. Lack of flexibility and adaptability, hanging on to old, outmoded beliefs inhibits our ability to learn.
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