Highlights From medium.com

There is not one but two questions of why in chess. I have the why of purpose such as the desire to win the game but I also have the why of movement as in “why this move over that?”

In this singular example, the why of movement and purpose was crystal clear to me. Certainly Themistocles had a purpose in saving the Greek states but he also had choices of where to defend. He must have decided why to defend using the “Hot Gates” over defending around Athens. There was a why of movement as in why defend here over there in much the... See more

Now imagine you’re playing against someone who can see something truly remarkable — the board. In this game, you will move Pawn(w), the opponent will counter Pawn (b), you will move again Pawn(w), they will counter Queen(b) and you will have lost. I’ve shown this in the figure below.

Remember, you have no idea that the board exists and you can only see what is on the left hand side i.e. the characters you press and the sequence. You will almost certainly be shocked by the speed at which you have lost the game. You’ll probably scribble down their sequence as some sort of magic sequence for you to re-use. However, every time you ... See more

figure 2: the two types of why - https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1... See more

To be honest, I hadn’t a clue whether it did or not. I had no idea what a real strategy was, let alone any concept of how to evaluate the document. I leafed through the pages, it all seemed to make sense, the diagrams looked good and I didn’t know what I was looking for anyway.

The first, and most obvious thing, is that they are visual. If I was going to move a piece on a map then I could point to where it was and where it needed to go. Navigation was visual but that was normal. Except, I realised it wasn’t. When people stopped me in their cars to find their way to the nearest petrol station — this was 2004 and GPS was st... See more

My company had a “why of purpose” which was to be the best “creative solutions group in the world”. It sucked. We were an online photo service, a consultancy, a European CRM, an Identity web service, a fulfilment engine and an assortment of special projects around 3D printing and the use of mobiles phones as cameras. I had no real way of determinin... See more

I was clearly clueless but at least I had found five factors that I wanted to use to fix our strategy, though I had no idea how to do this. But that presented another problem. What order matters? Is climate more important than landscape? Maybe leadership is more important than purpose? Is there a strict order in which we move through these things?