Orisinn
The importance of terrain in good strategy
A key element of good strategy is understanding the surrounding terrain and your position in it. Too often I see people jump to optimizing their strategic frameworks, but miss this crucial foundation. Without this, strategic frameworks - no matter how clever - are easily disarmed through contact with reality.
This concept may sound obvious, perhaps even mundane, but it is not trivial to do correctly. This is because you cannot actually see the terrain. If you cannot see the terrain, how exactly will you map it and subsequently identify where you are? This is a skill that is worth mastering. No matter how clever your strategy is, it’ll fail if it is misapplied to the situation at hand. A perfect strategy for lifting a heavy weight is completely useless if you’re dropped into the ocean.
Too often we try to construct strategies to tough questions without understanding this concept. Consider these common business problems:
How do I get another organization to align to my objectives?
How do I bring a new product to market and win?
How do I get investment for my new idea?
Your first inclination will likely be to recite best practices. Stop a moment — do you even know where you are before you decide where you’re going? Let’s try rephrasing these questions to ask “what is the terrain and where am I in it?”
How does the other organization view me? Are they in a position of strength or weakness compared to me? What problems are they wrestling with?
What does the market look like? What are the successful products doing and why? What are the unsuccessful products doing? Where am I in relation to them?
What does the investor appetite look like right now? What other pitches do they see? How do I look compared to those pitches?
Notice that by asking what the terrain is, we start developing a more well-rounded understanding of our position within it. It is crucial not to miss this step and to do it in good faith. Making assumptions here will lead you astray. We do not want to simply assume we are in a forest when in fact we are in the desert. We do not want to assume we have the high ground when in fact we’re completely exposed.
This concept exists in many other arenas where positional play is required to win. Think chess, sports, combat, and competitive cooking shows — anything that requires dynamic competition and the arrangement of positions.
At perhaps the highest stakes, it exists in military strategy. The ability to identify the terrain correctly and one’s position in it is a crucial skill of great military generals. Carl van Clausewitz, a Prussian general and military strategist, defined this concept in his treatise “On War”:
…the Commander in War must commit himself to a space which his eye cannot survey. The mental gift known by the term of Orisinn, or sense of locality, is the power of quickly forming a correct geometrical idea of any land. The Chief of an Army must make himself familiar with the geography; no doubt maps, books, memoirs, and the assistance of his Staff, are a great help; but if he has a talent for forming a picture quickly and distinctly, it makes his action easier and firmer, and less dependent on others.
Consider the difficulty of placing soldiers at various locations against an enemy who is also moving against you. If you cannot actually understand the terrain around you, you’re destined for failure. And yet again, as simple as it sounds, Clausewitz took the time to explicitly define "Orisinn” as a skill of great generals. He saw it make or break battles. If even in one of the most dangerous of engagements such a skill is a trump card, consider what it can do for you in simpler environments.