Strategy As Wayfinding

My previous boss was good at reminding me that strategy is not an exercise to be performed once a year and put in a binder, but is what should guide the 10,000 small decisions made in a company every day. Every company, to be successful in the long-term needs to have a strategy, even if that strategy is to be alert and responsive to what comes its way. One of the problems with strategy is the abstractness of the concept. When I'm at a party, and I say I work on strategy people tend to be interested and intrigued, but naturally pretty clueless on what it means I actually do each day (so I usually say I design things instead). The standard way we understand abstract concepts is to map them to something physical using metaphor. You can see this in a good deal of the standard language we use to talk about (among others) business strategy, for example:

• This company's really lost its way
• We need to follow our guiding star
• They have two very different paths ahead of them
• Our strategy enables us to get to our vision
• Britain's strategic direction
• The competitive landscape

I have come to understand other facets of Strategy As Wayfinding from my very concrete knowledge of hiking in the mountains (hiking gives you lots of time to think). It gives me another angle to get to grips with strategy.

If you think about it, planning a hiking trip is not so different from directing a business.

Goal	Destination
Resources	Food and gear
Motivation	Energy
The competitive landscape	Map
Teammates	Fellow hikers
Deadline	Arrival time (e.g. before it gets dark)
What you're working on	Your next steps

When we're out hiking I tend to do a lot of the navigating. It's not always intentional, I evidently have a need to know that we are, literally, on the right track to reach where we need to get to. As a result I have come to think of good wayfinding as needing three separate pieces of knowledge. If I am missing one of these then I start to worry.

1. Do I know where to step next?

• Is the next minute of hiking obvious to choose?
• Can I negotiate any obstacles immediately in front of me - rock faces, logs, or marsh?
• Can I see the trail right in front of me?

This first set of questions lead to clarity of execution. Everyone knows what they need to do now and it becomes a question of mind over matter to push yourself through it, or over it. If it's really obvious and we're not traveling fast we can even enjoy the scenery as we go.

2. What nearby landmark are we headed to?

• This is about mid-term navigation - the next 5 minutes of hiking. Are we headed up to the top of the rocky outcrop, curving around it, or descending underneath it.
• Is the trail going to peter out in just a few minutes or stay clear?
• What is your next goal in the hike? Reach the lake, climb the ridge, cross the meadow?

Knowing where the next five minutes of path are leading to ensures that I can enjoy each step to get there. It's a little like Flow: Where to step next is knowing what to do to move forward; and knowing the landmark you're headed to allows you to see if you're making the progress you need.

3. Is this the right overall direction?

• Are we heading down the right valley?
• Should we be on the West side of the mountain or the East?
• Is this even the right mountain?
• Do we have time to hike this mountain or are we better off enjoying the lake before it gets dark?

While you can be confident about near and mid-term navigation and be very much enjoying your hike, this one is the really crucial one. It's the one I got wrong on the day I proposed to my fiancee by clearly seeing a trail heading down from the cloud in Mt Snowdon and marching us down the wrong valley (fortunately she still said yes). In that case I could clearly see 'the' trail and even the trail a little further down in the cloud, but I had no confirmation that we were on the correct trail in the first place. This last one is also the innovator's dilemma one - it's following the route you know gets you to the top, and then another group finding a shorter and easier way to higher up the mountain by coming up the other side.

We experienced the challenge of difficult mid-term wayfinding in Jonkershoek, South Africa

I have found that these same guidelines I use for wayfinding in the mountains help me think about strategy more clearly. I need to know:

1. The next steps - It should be clear what we are working on now
2. The nearby landmark - It should be clear what our immediate (say, quarterly) goals are and that what we're working on will help us achieve them
3. The right overall direction - are we on course to achieve our vision for the company

While it's nothing new to break up strategy into say, now, next, later, actions, I do find that the concreteness of wayfinding while hiking gives me more clarity about how these all fit together - plus, lots of first-hand experience to draw from. I haven't tried it yet, but maybe I'll risk saying strategy at the next party and start talking about hiking instead.

__
This is the fifth in a series of thoughts about what I learned from 6 months traveling across Central America, Southeast Asia and South Africa.