Reflections 6th July
Navigating Spaces - and the Nature of Probably
The idea of "spaces" is a constant companion at the moment as I watch organisations, assumptions and entire industries dissolving. They remind me of the ways we are now able to observe distant galaxies dying and being born, aware that what we are seeing happened millions or billions of years ago, and that we can do nothing about it.
All we can do is watch, wonder, learn, and prepare to navigate into the new spaces that are emerging.
Our eldest grandchild has just finished his GCSEs. It is a strange feeling, as it seems like only a decade ago (rather than six!) I was doing mine, including one in marine navigation, to persuade the Royal Air Force to take me on.
Navigation then was very different. Navigation on land was relatively straightforward - a map, a compass and two points to take bearings on and you were pretty much done.
Marine navigation was different. The land tends not to move around too much, and so marine navigation was then as much an art as a science. It involved learning the mysteries of sextants, chronometers, longitude, latitude and compass deviation. It involved tide tables and charts compiled decades earlier, as well as celestial navigation, unless it was cloudy, and dead reckoning, using chronometer and compass - essentially:
"If we started here, and we've been going that way for this long at this speed, where are we now?"
Which meant that knowing where you started was rather important.
The longer you had to navigate using dead reckoning without other means of determining your location, the greater the propensity to get seriously lost.
It generated a degree of healthy professional scepticism, keeping company with "probably".
The Nature of Probably
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!"
Niels Bohr
Working with "probably" is a discipline unto itself. It is a collaborative exercise that asks us to involve others, from getting other people to take readings, to noticing signals from wildlife, to observing the colour of clouds, and changing wind direction, to identifying smells and sounds.
The experienced navigators we met had an air of authority and mystery that made Gandalf look like an accountant.
Technology has changed that very quickly, and now we can determine our position, direction, weather, and time to destination instantly.
If, of course, we are required at all. We have entered the era of not just GPS, but the robotaxi and the robomanager, and there are credible discussions arguing that AI makes a better CEO than carbon-based versions.
Which is fine, as long as the technology is available, we trust it, and as importantly the people who own it.
However, here's what I've learned: technology cannot solve the fundamental challenge of navigating between spaces when the very act of observation alters what we're observing.
When Maps Become Obsolete and Territory Shifts
"The Map is not the Territory"
Alfred Korzybski
The quality that has enabled humans to become the apex species on the planet is our ability to tell stories. Stories join us together in common action.
Maps are stories. How we learn to work with them matters.
Learning how to remake them matters more.
In our current era of dissolving spaces, I think we face a double challenge: the territory itself shifts faster than our mapmaking can keep pace, and every time we take bearings, we change the landscape we're trying to navigate. Market research alters customer expectations. Competitive analysis signals our intentions. Strategic planning creates momentum that reshapes the very environment we're trying to map.
This "navigational interference” means our attempt to establish position alters the terrain we're mapping. It means not just moving between spaces, we're reshaping them through our observation and action.
The Nature of Spaces and Stories
Science offers us temporary truths, two-dimensional maps to help us navigate towards a destination we can see.
Stories offer us metaphors for eternal truths that guide us past the horizon. Celestial navigation for the soul
Investors on the other want certainty. Curiosity and reflection rarely feature.
If navigation is the art of finding our way from one space to another, then perhaps it is less about knowing where we're going and more about maintaining orientation while moving through mystery.
The old industrial space—with its predictable hierarchies, stable markets, and controllable outcomes—is dissolving. The new space—networked, adaptive, uncertain—is still forming. I believe we're navigating the transition between these spaces while simultaneously helping to create the new one, and that both we and organisations must adapt. We need new ways of thinking.
Millennia ago, before maps, Polynesian navigators did not try to find their way from one place to another. The Polynesian art of navigation embodied a profound reimagining of movement itself - rather than sailing toward distant islands, master navigators spoke of "calling the islands to them."
They would position their va'a (voyaging canoe) at the centre of an expanding universe of wave patterns, wind shifts, bird flights, and celestial movements. They read these converging signals as evidence that land was drawing near. By maintaining their vessel as the still point while the ocean world moved around them, navigators could detect the subtle pull of an island's presence. They sensed the way swells refracted off distant shores, how certain seabirds appeared at predictable distances from land, and how clouds formed differently over hidden atolls.
This wasn't metaphysical thinking, but practical mastery. They understood that navigation is fundamentally about relationships and pattern recognition, rather than conquering distance. Instead of imposing their will upon the ocean by force, they developed such sensitivity to the sea's intelligence that islands would reveal themselves through the water's language. The navigator became a conduit for the ocean's knowledge rather than its opponent, calling forth destinations through deep attunement rather than aggressive pursuit.
I think the metaphor matters because it suggests a different relationship between the navigator and the environment, the individual and the organisation—one of collaboration rather than conquest, and pattern recognition rather than prediction.
From Two-Body to Three-Body Navigation
Columbus and Magellan relied almost entirely on dead reckoning, correcting their course when possible by sighting land or making celestial fixes.
Leaders currently responsible for guiding us could learn from that approach to uncertainty.
Currently, our organisations appear to be "following the science" while lacking a compelling narrative. They have no story. I see them navigating within sight of land, relying on reference points that do not move, including the idea that financial measures are the only arbiter of growth.
The more they begin to sense otherwise, the more defensive they become. They look back at the familiar, hoping to make it relevant again. Populism in America and Europe harks back to the divine right of kings, and organisations look back fondly to the days of enclosure of the commons.
Control, not collaboration.
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
Ursula K. Le Guin in a speech she gave when accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014.
Navigating open waters, out of sight of land, is a very different experience. We need more points of reference, and we need to understand what happens when we add them.
Traditional strategic planning operates like coastal navigation—using two familiar reference points to establish a bearing. Conventional wisdom has organisations typically compare their internal capabilities to external market conditions, which provides direction but not precise positioning. They know roughly which way to head, but are essentially operating along a line of infinite possibilities.
This two-body system feels manageable because it's predictable. Like navigation using two reference points. You can model the relationship between an organisation and its environment, create strategic plans, and expect reasonably reliable outcomes.
It's Newtonian thinking—deterministic, controllable, reassuring and outdated.
But add a third reference point—technological disruption, regulatory change, cultural evolution—and everything changes. Suddenly, we're operating in what physicists refer to as the three-body problem.
The Three-Body Problem: When Prediction Becomes Impossible
The three-body problem represents one of physics' most profound discoveries about the limits of prediction. While you can perfectly calculate the future motion of two celestial bodies orbiting each other, add a third orbiting body, and the system becomes fundamentally chaotic.
No mathematical solution exists, regardless of computational power or precision of initial measurements. What appears to be a simple extension—just one more variable—actually crosses a threshold into radical uncertainty. Tiny changes in starting conditions lead to completely different outcomes over time. It isn't a failure of mathematics or measurement; it's a revelation about how complex systems actually behave. Some systems are inherently unknowable, not because we lack information, but because prediction itself becomes impossible once you move beyond simple relationships into dynamic complexity.
For organisations navigating between dissolving and emerging spaces, I believe that the crucial third orbiting point might be our human adaptive capacity—our ability to sense what the data does not measure, respond to it, and evolve.
However, this introduces what I call the navigator's paradox: the very triangulation that offers us positional accuracy simultaneously makes our trajectory unpredictable. The third point gives us short-term certainty, even as it introduces longer-term chaos. We gain precision about where we are while losing certainty about where we're going.
It’s little surprise that so much business thinking is short-term.
Our current version of capitalism relies on two-body thinking. As a result, I believe we now face a three-body problem, as technology, climate change, and social change introduce ever more orbiting variables.
The Human Art of Navigating Chaos
Our political and corporate navigators are lost. Being lost is sometimes inevitable; the hubris of those who insist we are not is what is causing the damage we see around us.
To make the economic machine work, we are treating probabilities as certainties.
Understanding the space we are in and either changing it or navigating to a different space requires more of us.
I think it demands pattern recognition over prediction: The greatest navigators throughout history could read subtle changes in wave patterns, cloud formations, or bird behaviour, not to predict precisely, but to sense when the system was shifting.
It asks us to respect embodied intuition: Experienced sailors developed what they called "sea sense"—a felt understanding of their vessel's relationship to wind, current, and weather that operated below conscious thought. It is not "woo"—it's accumulated wisdom.
Perhaps most crucial is what I see as the paradoxical quality of adaptive confidence: being simultaneously confident enough to act decisively while humble enough to change course instantly when new information emerges. This isn't the brittle confidence of certainty, but the flexible confidence that comes from trusting our navigation capabilities rather than our predictions.
Great navigators learned to be at home in not-knowing, to find stability in instability itself. People who can tolerate uncertainty are more creative, make better decisions under pressure, and are less susceptible to misinformation. They develop what I call temporal patience: the capacity to operate across multiple time horizons simultaneously, making immediate tactical decisions, implementing medium-term course corrections, and maintaining long-term directional integrity.
The Polynesians understood this millennia ago:
"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches."
Polynesian Proverb
The Navigator's Craft
These navigation capabilities point toward a different kind of professional practice—what I'm calling artisan navigation. Unlike the industrial model of following predetermined plans, artisan navigators develop craft skills for reading complex systems and creating maps while moving.
They choose domains to master that involve creation rather than extraction. They curate wisdom and authority for those they serve. They don't rush, understanding that craft takes time. They work with others who can provide different perspectives and sensing capabilities.
Most importantly, they understand that in times of dissolving spaces, the navigator's role isn't to predict the future but to remain oriented and intentional while moving through uncertainty.
New Stories for New Spaces
I believe we are at a critical point.
We cannot accept the maps that our storytellers have been offering us. Even a cursory glance at the business press shows us why. The prevailing narrative suggests that we no longer have a part to play as technology will do it for us. They have the technology, and we have little choice.
However, while technology can help us navigate, it cannot take us where we want to go on its own.
We need storytellers with a different story, one that recognises humans as essential navigators in the space between what was and what might be.
The new stories I think we need include stories of collaboration rather than conquest. Just as the Polynesian navigators who called islands to them, we need narratives about working with systems rather than against them.
We need stories of pattern recognition over prediction, acknowledging wisdom comes from reading signals and sensing shifts rather than creating detailed forecasts. Stories about adaptive capacity, celebrating the human qualities that enable navigation in uncertainty—intuition, pattern recognition, adaptive confidence, temporal patience.
We need stories of craft and curation that recognise in a world of infinite information, the ability to sense what matters and create meaning becomes essential. Stories of meaningful work require narratives that connect individual craft to larger purposes worth navigating toward.
We need storytellers who understand that we are not passengers in this transition but active navigators, creating the new space through our choices, our craft, and our courage to move into uncertainty with intention.
The space that is dissolving may be familiar, but it has become a place where we feel we do not belong. The space we are navigating toward is still forming, and I believe we have the opportunity to help shape it through the stories we tell and the craft we develop, creating something and somewhere better than what is dissolving.
Science without story lacks meaning, like using GPS without being able to read a map.
Story without the humility of scientific uncertainty becomes dangerous mythology.
We are in unfamiliar territory and need new navigators.
I think the future belongs to those who can navigate between spaces—reading the dissolution of the old, sensing the emergence of the new, and maintaining orientation while moving through the mystery of transformation itself.
This is where I find myself on my journey. It's great to have you along.
Outside the Walls to chart new maps of work.
And New Artisans to practice the new navigation.
People and Information I’ve Found Interesting This Week.
Craftmanship. What science says about craft, creativity and mental health.
Joe Procopio. The rise of the startup collective
Richard Claydon. Leadership, Rewritten
Cal Newport. Does AI make us lazy?
My version of the Razzies. McKinsey rediscovers people…
And a Closing Thought
“Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organised.”
Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times: The Play