c4ss1us [l1f3]

I was clearly clueless but at least I had found five factors that I wanted to use to fix our strategy, though I had no idea how to do this. But that presented another problem. What order matters? Is climate more important than landscape? Maybe leadership is more important than purpose? Is there a strict order in which we move through these things?

figure 6: basic elements of a map - https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1... See more

Categorising situational awareness

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.

Since Sun Tzu had principally written about military combat, I started diving into military history in the hope of finding other lessons. I became obsessively fascinated by the extensive use of maps in battle and for learning throughout history. Topographical intelligence became a hugely important and decisive factor in numerous battles of the Amer... See more

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?

I became convinced that whilst we had a purpose of sorts, we had no real direction nor any mechanism of learning nor any means to determine the why of movement which is at the heart of strategy. We were successful in that we stumbled from one opportunity to another but we could just as easily be walking further out to sea as much as crossing the ri... See more

In a high situational awareness environment such as using a chess board, then navigation tends to be visual, learning is from context specific play and strategy is based upon position and movement. However, in my business then navigation was storytelling, learning was from copying others i.e. secrets of success and strategy was based upon magic fra... See more