Throughout our leadership journey, we’ve explored establishing foundations, building trust, and balancing routines with innovation. Today, we examine a critical leadership skill: the ability to navigate by balancing pre-made plans with real-time observations: what explorers call reading both the map and the landscape.
In wilderness expeditions, maps are invaluable tools. They provide perspective, highlight known obstacles, and suggest potential routes. However, experienced adventurers know that even the best maps have limitations; they can’t show recent changes, unexpected conditions, or the nuances that might make one path better than another on a particular day. That’s why the most successful explorers develop dual literacy: they can interpret both the map’s guidance and the landscape’s reality.
This dual literacy translates perfectly to leadership. Your strategic plans, market research, and organizational charts serve as your maps: providing crucial guidance and context. But the daily reality of your organization, the unspoken dynamics, emerging opportunities, and subtle challenges, these form your landscape. Reading both effectively requires different skills that must work in harmony.
Reading the map in leadership means:
- Understanding industry trends and market forecasts
- Recognizing established organizational structures and processes
- Following strategic plans and established metrics
- Learning from historical data and precedents
- Adhering to proven best practices
Reading the landscape means:
- Sensing team energy and unspoken concerns
- Noticing informal influence networks and communication patterns
- Identifying emerging opportunities before they appear in reports
- Detecting early warning signs that might not yet show in metrics
- Feeling shifts in organizational culture and stakeholder relationships
The most effective leaders, like skilled mountaineers, know when to trust each source of information. When the map and landscape align, the path forward is clear. When they conflict, discernment becomes essential. Is your map outdated? Is your reading of the landscape clouded by limited perspective? Or is this simply one of those moments where reality has shifted faster than documentation?
This balance requires cultivating several key capacities:
- Data literacy to interpret quantitative information properly
- Emotional intelligence to sense the human factors at play
- Pattern recognition to connect seemingly unrelated signals
- Contextual awareness to understand how various elements influence each other
- Decisiveness to move forward when map and landscape send mixed signals
Remember: your strategic plans weren’t designed to be followed blindly, but rather to serve as guideposts for informed judgment. The best leaders maintain enough confidence in their plans to stay committed to long-term objectives, while remaining sufficiently humble to adapt their approaches based on emerging realities.
Next week, we’ll explore “Thriving on Risk” – the art of calculated risk-taking in leadership. Until then, consider your own navigational tendencies. Do you rely more heavily on formal plans or instinctive observations? How might you strengthen whichever skill needs more development?
