Highlights From medium.com

The point of this example is to demonstrate three things. First, the process of strategy is not a linear process but an iterative cycle. The climate may affect your purpose, the environment may affect your strategy and your actions may affect all. Second, acting is essential to learning. Lastly your purpose isn’t fixed, it changes as your landscape... See more

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.

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

Doctrine is the training of your forces, the standard ways of operating and the techniques that you almost always apply. These are the universal principles, the set of beliefs that appear to work regardless of the landscape that is faced.

We had become highly profitable, we had a million or so in the bank and we were growing. But we had done so not through any deliberate focus on the landscape but instead by just grabbing opportunities and cost cutting where we could. The team were already exhausted.

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

The second thing to note with a map is it is context specific i.e. the battle at hand. You learn from that context and how pieces move in it, in much the same way you learn from games in chess. However, in order to do this you need to know the position of pieces on the map and where they can move to. But position is relative to something. In the ca... See more

Remember, you have no idea that the board exists and you can only see what is on the left hand side i.e. the characters you press and the sequence. You will almost certainly be shocked by the speed at which you have lost the game. You’ll probably scribble down their sequence as some sort of magic sequence for you to re-use. However, every time you ... 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?