Have You Lost Your Map?

Why leaders need to rediscover the ground before they can move

A commander stands on a ridge at first light. The air is cold, the ground uneven. Scouts return in ones and twos, each with fragments of information that contradict the last. The map does not match the terrain. Units are not where they were supposed to be. The enemy has advanced more quickly than expected. The weather has turned. Every decision involves trade-offs that will hurt someone. There is no pause button.

The commander has a plan. It is already fraying.

Strategy, for this person, is not a slide. It is not a document approved six months ago. It is the continuous act of noticing, interpreting, and deciding in the face of imperfect information, real consequences, and the knowledge that the next choice may not be the right one.

That commander is closer to what strategy was designed to address than the executive presenting to a nodding boardroom.

Now transpose that scene. A leadership team sits around a table, staring at red, amber, and green dashboards showing performance against a plan conceived months ago. They debate targets, messaging, and initiatives as if the external environment were a static backdrop and the internal organisation a neutral machine. There are plenty of numbers, plenty of artefacts. But no real map.

The distance between these two figures is not historical. It is conceptual. One starts from the ground and forces. The other starts from aspiration and slides. Something fundamental shifted in how we conceive what strategy is, what it assumes about the world, and what it asks of the people who must enact it.

The commander had a map.

Whatever its flaws, the commander’s map gave them something most leadership teams lack entirely: a structured representation of the ground they were operating on and the forces available to move across it.

Sun Tzu did not begin with aspiration. He began with observation. Know the ground. Know the weather. Know your forces and their condition. Know the adversary’s disposition. Strategy was not imposed on the landscape. It emerged from reading it.

The map was never perfect. Every commander knew that. But the discipline of creating it forced a confrontation with reality. You had to study the external environment as it actually was. You had to honestly assess your own capabilities, including gaps, fatigue, and units that were not where the plan said they should be. And you had to hold both views together, because strategy lives in the relationship between the two. The ground tells you what is possible. Your forces tell you what is feasible. The interaction between them reveals your actual options.

This is what Hoverstadt and Loh describe as ‘fit’: the evolving relationship between your organisation and the environment in which it operates. Not alignment in the corporate sense, which usually means forcing the inside to match a declared intent. Fit in the strategic sense: understanding how your structural disposition creates or constrains your ability to manoeuvre.

The commander’s advantage was not certainty. It was orientation—a live, shared picture of ground and forces that people could reason from together.

Most leadership teams have lost theirs.

Walk into most boardrooms and ask: “ Where is your map”?

Not the strategy document. Not the balanced scorecard. Not the brand positioning framework. The map. The representation of the external environment your organisation operates within: the actors, the relationships, the flows of value and innovation, the power dynamics, the direction of travel, and the rate of change. And alongside it, an honest account of your organisation’s actual capabilities, structural couplings, and the identity your behaviour reveals rather than the one your website declares.

Most cannot produce either.

You see this in the way strategies are framed. “Market leadership by 2030.” “Customer-centric transformation.” These phrases float free of the ground. There is no profound articulation of the ecosystem they sit in. No honest assessment of the organisation that is supposed to execute. The language sounds strategic, but it connects to nothing you can point at, test, or act on.

What leadership teams have instead of a map are dashboards. And dashboards are not maps.

Dashboards are not ground.

In theory, dashboards provide a window into reality. In practice, they provide a window into what the organisation is willing to report.

Dashboards are retrospective. They tell you what has already happened, filtered through metrics chosen to make the organisation legible to itself. Data is lagging; by the time something appears as a number, the underlying pattern has often been in motion for months. Context is absent. A percentage change is meaningless without a sense of who else is moving, how fast, and in what direction.

And dashboards are structurally prone to gaming. When people know what gets measured, they optimise for the measure, not the outcome. Revenue targets get hit through channel-stuffing. Customer satisfaction scores rise while actual service erodes. Behaviour adapts to the indicators, even when that adaptation corrodes the strategic position.

Most critically, dashboards are inward-looking. They show throughput, utilisation, budget variance, and project status. They tell you nothing about the ground you are operating on. Nothing about shifts on the wider ecosystem, nothing about who else is playing what strategies, nothing about the dynamics that will reshape your options, whether you notice them or not.

Internally generated metrics feed back into internally generated narratives, and the loop closes. That feels to leadership teams as though they have control. What it actually produces is drift.

A commander accepting a spreadsheet of unit strengths as a substitute for walking the ground is a commander about to be surprised. Leaders should be equally suspicious of a strategy that lives solely on screens.

Ecosystem as ground

In previous articles, I explored how organisations operate not in markets but in ecosystems, and how strategy emerges from the evolving interplay between your organisation and the actors around it. The ecosystem approach reframes strategy as a problem of fit, power, and time across a web of interdependent relationships.

But here is the practical implication that often gets missed: if you accept that your organisation exists within an ecosystem, then your first job as a strategist is to map it. Not once. Continuously.

Ecosystem modelling is the modern equivalent of walking the battlefield. It starts with a definition: what does this ecosystem actually do, who does it serve, what does it include, and what does it exclude? Then structure: who are the actors, how are they grouped, what are the power differentials, who sits at the leading edge and who trails? From there, it examines value and innovation: where resources flow, what each actor needs, gives, and gets, and where value is trapped or misaligned. It maps the strategies being played across the ecosystem, where intensity concentrates, and where gaps exist. It identifies keystones: actors whose presence the system depends on. It examines dynamics: what is changing, how fast, which second-order effects are emerging, and whether your tempo matches the rate of change around you.

This is not a theoretical exercise. It is practical reconnaissance. When you see your ecosystem as a living network rather than a static “market,” you stop assuming you are the central actor. You start to see constraints and leverage points more clearly. You recognise that your fate is bound up with others, and that strategy must account for their moves as well as your own.

An ecosystem map that sits in a drawer is no better than the strategy document it was supposed to inform. The commander did not consult the map once and put it away. The map was a living reference, constantly revised against incoming intelligence.

Organisation is the other half of the map

I have argued previously that organisation always precedes strategy. The organisation you have defines the strategies you are capable of developing, let alone executing. Strategy and organisation are coupled: each shapes and is shaped by the other.

But the internal view most leaders carry into the boardroom is rarely honest enough to be useful. The sanitised version that makes it through the board pack bears little resemblance to how the organisation actually behaves.

An honest internal map covers at least three things.

Information flows. Who actually knows what is happening at the edge, and how does that information move? Where does it get blocked, diluted, or reinterpreted to fit an existing narrative?

Decision rights. Who can commit the organisation to action in response to what they see? How fast can they do that without triggering defensive antibodies from above?

Capabilities and identity. Not the declared version but the revealed one. Stafford Beer’s principle remains the sharpest diagnostic: the purpose of a system is what it does. If the organisation says it values innovation but systematically punishes risk, its actual purpose is safety. If it claims to be customer-led but routes every decision through internal politics, its actual purpose is self-preservation.

When leaders sit in a boardroom without a clear view of their own structures, they mistake aspiration for capability. They commit to manoeuvres their organisation cannot coordinate. They confuse declarations of culture with the actual patterns of interaction.

A helpful map does not flatter you. It reveals the real limits of choice and the real spaces where you have room to move.

What it means to have a map

So what does it look like for leaders to operate from a map rather than a plan?

Start with observation, not aspiration. Spend real time understanding the ecosystem: actors, relationships, flows of value and innovation, dynamics shaping change. Capture it visually enough that people can point to where they sit and where they do not.

Connect the external map to the internal structure. Lay your organisation onto that ecosystem. Where do you actually connect? Where are you absent? Where are you overexposed? How do your structures, processes, and culture amplify or blunt those connections?

Treat strategy as a pattern, not a project. Rather than managing a list of initiatives, focus on the pattern of moves and relationships you are trying to shape over time. This shifts attention from owning assets to improving fit, power, and timing.

Design for continuous orientation. Build the equivalent of scouts. Not a market research function that produces an annual insights deck, but distributed sensing across teams, customers, partners, and critics. The job is to keep the map up to date, not to wait for the next offsite.

Protect freedom of action. Execution in a shifting environment is about managing degrees of freedom, not enforcing compliance. Clear intent, understood constraints, decentralised decision-making, and short feedback loops allow the organisation to manoeuvre as the map changes.

Leaders who do this still face uncertainty and trade-offs. The difference is that their choices are grounded in a live understanding of where they are, who they are in relation to others, and what the terrain affords.

Have you lost your map?

The uncomfortable question for many leadership teams is simple. If you had to put your current “map” on the table right now, what would show up?

A few competing vision statements and a brand onion. A stack of KPIs and traffic lights. A segmentation slide from last year’s strategy day. A target operating model that assumes the environment will sit still while you rewire.

What is usually missing is the thing the commander on the ridge cannot live without: an honest, shared picture of ground and forces, external and internal, that people can reason from together.

When that is missing, strategies drift into theatre. They look plausible in the room, but they do not connect to the ecosystem or the organisation that must act. Execution becomes a struggle to make reality conform to slides, rather than a continual process of adapting fit.

If you recognise that pattern, the task is not to sharpen the next plan. It is to rediscover your map.

Not a perfect one. Not one that pretends to remove uncertainty. A working map of your ecosystem and your organisation that is good enough to guide choice, and alive enough to change as the world moves.

Sun Tzu understood this. The commander on the ridge understood it. The strategist’s first job is not to declare intent. It is to see clearly.