From Strategy to a New View of Map-Making: Rethinking How Leaders Navigate Change

When the Map No Longer Matches the Territory

When COVID hit, business stopped almost overnight. Dining rooms closed, doors locked, and an entire way of operating became impossible. At that moment, it was clear: we were not in Kansas anymore.
As the CEO of a regional restaurant group, I watched 40 percent of our business disappear in a matter of days. The maps we’d relied on – the rhythms of the dining room, the face-to-face connection with guests, the sense of flow you can feel in a space – suddenly changed. We had been preparing for a future in which our teams would deepen their community presence, where employees could engage directly with customers and sense what was happening in real time. Then, overnight, that map became obsolete. No one was coming inside the restaurants.

The End of the Analog Map

In the analog world, we could see what was happening. Guests entered one by one. The kitchen could feel the pulse of the room. You could read the rhythm – how full the dining area was, who had just sat down, which tables were waiting for food.

Then came the digital flood. Online orders arrived not one at a time, they arrived in bursts – hundreds of people ordering simultaneously from who-knows-where. The kitchen no longer had a visible cue for demand. The flow disappeared, and with it, a sense of control.

Managers who had mastered the analog map suddenly found themselves overwhelmed. Some literally shut off digital ordering because it was too much to handle. Leaders at headquarters couldn’t understand why. From their perspective, digital orders meant growth, efficiency, revenue. From the store level, it felt like chaos. Only when we brought both sides together – leaders and frontline teams – did we start to understand the true nature of the change.

Every Five Percent Is a New Map

When we looked at the data together, we discovered something surprising: every five-percent increase in digital orders required a complete redesign of how the kitchen operated. At five percent, the system could absorb it. At ten percent, the timing broke down. At fifteen percent, we needed new roles, new equipment placement, and new communication loops. Each five-percent jump demanded a new mise en place – the French term chefs use for “everything in its place.”

We realized that what we were facing wasn’t just an operational problem. It was a map problem. The analog map assumed one order at a time. The digital map demanded simultaneous orchestration across invisible channels. Once we could name that, the overwhelm turned into curiosity. Instead of blaming talent or systems, we started asking: what does this new map require of us? That shift – from frustration to mapping – changed everything.

The Breakthrough

The conversation moved from “Who’s at fault?” to “What’s the new design?” Leaders learned what it meant to truly listen to those closest to the change. Managers learned what it meant to share data upward so everyone could see the same landscape. Together we began remapping – not just for the restaurant floor, also for supply chain, distribution, marketing, and finance.

We discovered that every time the environment changes by five percent, the rules change. That realization became a living metaphor for the entire company.

From the Kitchen to the C-Suite

Once the digital transition stabilized, something deeper unfolded. The leaders who had walked through that analog-to-digital shift began to think differently. They could now see maps in motion. They no longer expected a plan to remain static.

When distribution issues appeared, they remapped the flow of goods. When marketing had to pivot, they remapped the channels of conversation. When financial projections shifted weekly, they remapped how forecasts were made. The organization had developed a new structure of mind – a collective capacity to move fluidly with change.

The Leadership Metaphor

What happened in the restaurants is a mirror for what’s happening across business and society. Every five-percent increase in market complexity, product velocity, or AI integration asks for a new cognitive map. The world isn’t pausing for us to catch up. There is no “settling in.” Each incremental shift asks us to reinvent how we think, sense, and act.

In the analog era, we could afford to plan linearly: set a strategy, execute, measure, adjust. In the digital era, the map updates itself millions of times per day. This calls for what we might name a fluid structure of awareness – an ability to hold coherence while the environment keeps refreshing. It’s no longer enough to react faster; we need to perceive differently.

The Next Frontier

If analog to digital was about technology, we could say the next frontier is an internal shift in the consciousness that is viewing the mapping. Just as every five-percent increase in digital orders required a new kitchen design, every five-percent increase in the complexity of our world requires an upgrade in our structure of mind.
That might mean expanding from IQ (intellectual understanding) to EQ (emotional awareness) and SQ (spiritual or systems intelligence). It might mean developing the discipline to pause before reacting – to create space for multiple possibilities before fixing on one story. It might mean building teams that can map in layers: operational, relational, ethical, and future-oriented simultaneously.

This is not a luxury skill. It’s survival in the meta-crisis. If the world is changing at exponential speed, then our capacity to map may need to evolve just as rapidly.

From Strategy to A New View of Map-Making

The analog era prized the strategic plan: five years, three years, one year. Milestones, deliverables, KPIs.
Chefs learn mise en place. Musicians learn scales. Do we train our leaders in map-making?

Do we invest in helping people see change as an invitation to create? Every organization can develop this muscle. It begins with awareness: realizing that the plan is only as useful as the map behind it, and the map is only as alive as our capacity to sense what’s moving.

The Invitation

Moving from analog to digital isn’t just about technology. There’s analog ways of thinking and being, and digital ways of thinking and being. To shift consciously from one to the other requires a shift in structure of mind that allows for a fluid movement between them.

We’ve learned that every five-percent change in our environment asks for a corresponding five-percent expansion in awareness. When that happens, something beautiful unfolds: fear gives way to creativity, burnout gives way to meaning, and leadership becomes less about control and more about coherence. This is a new kind of leadership for the world we’re in – where maps update by the second and the future keeps arriving in its own timing.