Michael Lissack Guidelines for Using Landscape Images To effectively leverage landscape imagery for organizational under- standing and coherence, consider the following practical guidelines:
1. Take Advantage of Natural Propensities
Humans naturally think in landscape terms. Rather than fighting this cognitive tendency by imposing abstract frameworks, leverage it de- liberately by incorporating landscape imagery into your organizational communication and thinking. Start meetings with brief landscape visualization exercises: “Before we dive into the data, let’s take a moment to visualize our market position. If our competitive environment were a physical landscape, what would it look like right now? What features would be most prominent? Where would we be located?” This simple practice activates spatial thinking capabilities that remain underutilized in conventional business analysis. The resulting insights often complement and enrich data-driven perspectives.
2. Examine Landscape Integrity
Ask yourself and your organization landscape image questions: Does your landscape hold together? Does it have a sense of integrity and coher- ence? Fragmented, disconnected landscapes are difficult places to traverse and to use as a base. Systematically examine your mental landscapes for coherence and completeness. Are there unexplored regions? Missing connections? Barriers that shouldn’t exist? Areas of unnecessary complexity? When Microsoft’s cloud strategy team mapped their service land- scape, they discovered what they called “mountain passes blocked by boul- ders”—integration points between services that should have been smooth but were unnecessarily difficult to traverse. This landscape imagery helped
86
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease