Highlights From medium.com

figure 1: the five factors - https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1... See more

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

Hence I turned to next factor which was doctrine or the standard ways of operating. This I thought would be easy as it’s just the good practice of business. I started looking into operational strategy and it was during that time another one of those blindingly obvious questions hit me. I was reading up on the great and good of business, those wise ... 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

figure 5: chess world vs the board - https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1... 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?

A decade later, I had risen through the ranks to become the CEO of another company. I was that most senior of executives. The company would live or die by the strategic choices I made, or so I thought. I wrote the strategy or at least variations were presented to me and I would decide. But, something had gone terribly wrong in my journey. Somehow a... See more

Frustrated with my own natural inability, I started to trawl through books on strategy. I was looking for some way of understanding, a framework or a reference point to compare against. More brutally, I was lost at sea and looking for something to grab hold off, an executive lifeboat.

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.