c4ss1us [l1f3]

The first, and most obvious thing, is that they are visual. If I was going to move a piece on a map then I could point to where it was and where it needed to go. Navigation was visual but that was normal. Except, I realised it wasn’t. When people stopped me in their cars to find their way to the nearest petrol station — this was 2004 and GPS was st... See more

I set out to fix this and the first thing I needed was a map.

We had five factors from purpose to landscape to climate to doctrine to leadership and somehow I had been jumping from purpose to leadership and missing three of them. Despite what I had read, there existed two very different forms of why that mattered — purpose and movement — and we weren’t even considering movement. We had no maps of the environm... See more

Imagine a normal six sided dice. Imagine you have two possible bets either 1 to 5 or the number 6. Now, basic probability would tell you to choose 1 to 5. Let us suppose you choose this, we roll the dice and it turns out to be 6. Were you wrong in your choice? Was the person who bet on six making the right strategic choice? If you didn’t understand... See more

Now, it’s worth remembering where I was back in 2004. I had a purpose which wasn’t static despite my belief it was. I was jumping to strategy whilst ignoring landscape, climate and doctrine. I was using storytelling to communicate with the entire group. I had no mechanism of learning. I was simply copying secrets of success from others combined wit... See more

The best way I’ve found to cope with this cycle is through the work of the exceptional John Boyd. In order to understand the process of air combat, John Boyd developed the OODA loop. This is a cycle of observe the environment, orient around it, decide and then act. In figure 7 below, I’ve married together both Sun Tzu and John Boyd to create a stra... See more

In 2004, I sat down in my boardroom with our strategy documents and started to dissect them. There were lots of familiar and comfortable terms. We had to be innovative, efficient, customer centric, web 2.0 and all that this entailed. Alas, I suspected these common “memes” were repeated in the strategy documents of other companies because I was pret... See more