I started using 2x2s, SWOTS, Porter’s forces and all manner of instruments. Everything felt lacking, nothing satisfied. I knew the company to the outside world was doing well but internally we had communication issues and frustration over direction and organisation.

I had even heard other people talk about how they had tried to copy this or that approach and it had failed and I had heard others say that it was their “execution that had failed”. Well what if it wasn’t? What if they had copied one context specific approach and applied it to the wrong context? What if it was just the wrong thing to do like bettin... See more

By chance, I picked up a copy of the “Art of War” by Sun Tzu . I noticed something that I had been missing in my understanding of strategy. Sun Tzu had described five factors that matter in competition between two opponents. Loosely speaking, these are: — purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine and leadership.

We weren’t heading in a particular direction; we were just opportunists. We lacked this whole “why of movement” that I had seen in Chess.

This gave me six absolute basic elements for any map which are visual representation, context specific, position of components relative to some form of anchor and movement of those components. I’ve summarised this in figure 6.

The problem I faced was trying to determine whether I understood the landscape of business or not? I knew that learning in both chess and military campaigns was different from what I was doing in business, but how? I put a map and a picture of chess board side-by-side and started to look at them. What is it that made these maps useful?