Key Insights: Master the Terrain to Win Your Strategy
- Winning is a function of positioning and execution. The right moves on the right terrain create sustainable advantage.
- Terrain shapes outcomes before strategy begins. Where you choose to compete has a direct impact on your ability to win.
- Clarity starts with context. A shared understanding of market, customer, competitor, and company dynamics is the foundation for effective strategy.
- Terrain is where advantage is created or lost. It’s a contested space influenced by shifting trends, competitors, and external forces.
- Great leaders identify the high ground. They focus resources where strengths align with opportunity and avoid areas of structural disadvantage.
- Speed without direction is a liability. Teams that default to action without analysis often miss critical signals in the terrain.
- Strategic navigation requires discipline. Capture the context, map the terrain, and chart a deliberate course forward.
“In the fight between the bear and the alligator, the outcome is determined by the terrain. Each animal presents a fearsome figure on its own turf. But the bear will flounder in a swamp, while the alligator surrenders many of its advantages when forced to fight on dry land. In a battle where the two are evenly matched, the victory will go to the one fighting on home terrain.”
Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape Communications
Swimming against the current. An uneven playing field. It’s an uphill battle. There are lots of expressions to convey a simple truth: terrain matters. Where we compete has a significant impact on our success or failure. As someone who grew up in the Chicagoland area in the 1990s cheering for Michael Jordan as he led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships, it was painful to see him step away from basketball during that run to play minor league baseball. Baseball was a different terrain, which negated a number of his basketball-related strengths such as his vertical leap, mid-range jump shot, and fiery competitive spirit. He went from basketball GOAT (greatest of all time) to baseball BAT (below average type).
The Difference Between Context and Terrain
When a business is losing revenue, market share, or customers, often the first thing to be questioned is the strategy. However, as I’ve learned over the past 25 years facilitating the strategic planning process, study of terrain comes before development of strategy. Even more specifically, we first need to assess the context—to gain a common understanding of the situation we’re in. Context is our lens of comprehension, describing and explaining what’s going on and how we can interpret it. This deeper level of understanding gained through contextual awareness then feeds our analysis of the terrain.
Terrain is the ground on which we operate. Where context is neutral in nature—the situation “is what it is”—terrain is contested. The arena or ground on which we compete has other players—customers, competitors, suppliers, regulators, etc.—and the terrain shapes the interaction between each. The contours of the terrain should progress us toward action or we risk being swallowed up by it. Think of companies that have failed such as Bed, Bath & Beyond, Party City, and Tupperware because they didn’t act as their position on the terrain shifted through digital disruption, demographic changes, and macroeconomic trends.
Seeing the Terrain
Terrain is the operational ground on which you have to compete. What is the high ground where can we position our business—the areas where we can leverage our strengths for competitive advantage? What are the valleys or choke points where competitors outperform us and can stall progress toward our goals? How do the rivers or desert—obstacles and lack of resources—change our strategy? Given our assessment of this ground, we need to answer three questions: 1) What can we do? 2) What can’t we do? 3) What should we do?
What’s fascinating about terrain is that we can successfully navigate our business over it if we take the time to thoughtfully observe it. However, due to people’s proclivity toward the “Fire—Ready—Aim” approach, investing time up front to understand context and analyze terrain often doesn’t happen. Airplanes are now equipped with the Terrain Awareness and Warning System (TAWS) because there were instances of perfectly good pilots flying highly functioning aircraft into mountains, oceans and other obstacles. The mountain didn’t magically appear—it was there on the map all along—but still the plane flew into it. As we know from the movies, now the pilots will hear several auditory caution messages right up until the dramatic “Terrain, terrain, pull-up!” exclamation.
This is often the case with why companies struggle. The mountain—whether it be a business model platform, bull market, or logistics fulfillment operation—is there on the map waiting to be noticed and navigated. It’s just that some leaders don’t take the time to pay attention to the shifting terrain until their perfectly good business crashes into something that was just sitting there.
3 Navigational Techniques
Here are three techniques to effectively navigate your terrain.
1. Capture the Context
An energizing and effective start to a strategy conversation involves a structured look at the current situation. I developed the Contextual Radar tool to help leaders think about and discuss the patterns and trends in their business located in four areas: Market, Customers, Competitors, and Company. This is where we diagnose what’s happening to provide a unified and more complete understanding of the business situation.
2. Create a Map
Once a shared understanding of the business situation is gained through context, create a map of the terrain. The map can include drawings, diagrams, and text regarding the key features on the ground in which your business competes. This includes the positions of yourself and key competitors, obstacles, demographic behaviors, the value chain, and any other contour factors. The map of the terrain informs what options you may consider pursuing.
3. Chart a Course
Once the situation is understood and the terrain is mapped, it’s time to chart your course. This initially involves taking stock of your resources, core competencies, and capabilities to determine what’s possible. Next, you’ll want to determine which potential paths are available. Then it comes down to moving from your current position of advantage, disadvantage or parity to progress toward the desired location on the map. As strategy can be described as how to get from where you are to where you want to go, here you’ll develop that strategy and execute it.
Like our friends the bear and the alligator, we need to determine where we have the best opportunity to win. Don’t wait for the warning, “Terrain, terrain, pull up!” to startle you out of the status quo. If your leadership team is always in action mode and failing to take collective time to understand the context and think strategically about the terrain, there’s a chance your strategy will get swamped. Instead, carve out time to see the situation, map the terrain, and chart your course with the intensity of a bear eating a beehive.