So how did I know that what I was copying would be right? Furthermore, even if it was right then how did I know it would be right for my business? When you think about military history, there are many moves that have been learned over time from one battle to another e.g. flanking an opponent to suppressing fire. These are context specific as in rel... See more

I knew we had been making decisions in a vacuum, I knew a lot was gut feel, I knew we had communication issues and finally I knew our learning was haphazard at best. But did situational awareness really matter in business? We were doing well, and maybe just copying lessons from those greats would suffice? I’d also heard others talk about how execut... See more

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

I started to consider strategy in terms of these five factors. I understood our purpose, or at least I thought I did, but what about landscape? Normally in military conflicts or even in games like chess we have some means of visualising the landscape through a map, whether it’s the more geographical kind that we are familiar with or an image of the... See more

Now both players can see what the other has pressed, white started with Pawn (w), black countered with Pawn (b) and so on. The game will continue until a draw is determined or someone has won. Neither player is aware of the concept of a board or that each of the characters may represent one of many pieces (i.e. there are eight Pawns). However, this... See more

The importance of maps in military history

Strategy in chess is all about the why of movement i.e. why you should move here over there. This was different from all the business strategy books that I had read. They tend to focus on the goal or the why of purpose as the all important factor in business. But the purpose of winning the game was not the same as the strategic choices I made durin... See more

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