Know Your Ground: Why Understanding the Landscape Is the First Step to Winning
Business leaders love to talk about disruption, agility, and “moving fast.” Yet ask any general, mountaineer, or competitive intelligence professional, and they’ll tell you a blunt truth: moving fast in the wrong direction just means you get lost sooner. Strategy begins not with speed, but with understanding the ground beneath your feet.
This isn’t just metaphorical. For centuries, militaries have invested staggering time and effort into mapping and understanding their operating environment. Why? Because success in war—and by extension in business—rarely belongs to the biggest army or the shiniest technology. It belongs to the side that understands the terrain, anticipates the obstacles, and positions themselves before the other side knows what’s happening.
And in Britain, the gold standard of that philosophy has long been the Ordnance Survey.
The Military’s Obsession with Maps
Let’s start with the obvious. Armies don’t march into the unknown with blind optimism and a PowerPoint deck. They study the terrain. They obsess over ridges, rivers, and choke points. They ask whether bridges can carry tanks, whether roads turn into mud in the rain, and whether a hillside can conceal artillery.
Napoleon reportedly said: “The map is everything.” He wasn’t exaggerating. The difference between victory and disaster often comes down to whether someone took the time to measure the ground.
The Second World War is full of examples. Allied planners preparing for D-Day had to understand not just the length of Normandy beaches, but the tide tables, sand quality, and even the hedgerow layout behind the shoreline. Soldiers trained on mocked-up villages in England that replicated what they’d encounter in France. Enormous intelligence units collected and updated maps constantly, because the battlefield punishes those who don’t know the lay of the land.
In business, our “battlefield” isn’t an actual beachhead, but the principle is identical. Launching a product, expanding into a region, or trying to outmaneuver a competitor without understanding the environment is strategic malpractice.
Ordnance Survey: Britain’s Strategic Mapmaker
The British military formalized this need for terrain intelligence in the 18th century. Following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the Crown realized it needed accurate maps of Scotland to control movement and prevent uprisings. By 1791, under the Board of Ordnance (hence “Ordnance Survey”), Britain began systematic, scientific mapping.
Over the next century, Ordnance Survey became legendary for precision. Soldiers relied on their maps to navigate hills, defend positions, and plan campaigns. Civil engineers used them to build canals, roads, and railways. By the First World War, OS had evolved into an industrial-scale intelligence operation, producing thousands of maps for every conceivable purpose: trench construction, artillery targeting, logistics planning.
This wasn’t a “nice to have.” It was national infrastructure, the information backbone that allowed Britain to project power.
The Business Parallel
Now, you may think: “That’s quaint history. What’s it got to do with my quarterly targets?”
Plenty.
Maps are just one form of intelligence. In business, the “terrain” is the competitive landscape. The rivers are supply chains. The ridges are regulatory barriers. The choke points are distribution bottlenecks. And your competitors? They’re the other army, looking at the same map and planning their own moves.
If you don’t understand your environment—customers, partners, competitors, regulators—you’re just marching blind. It doesn’t matter how shiny your product demo is.
Take retail expansion. Countless chains have failed by planting stores in “attractive” locations without understanding foot traffic patterns, local regulations, or shifting demographics. It’s the equivalent of setting up camp in a valley prone to flooding. By contrast, the winners analyze every factor: transport links, catchment demographics, competitor presence, future urban planning. They map the terrain, literally and metaphorically.
Or consider technology adoption. A hardware vendor might boast about a slick product, but if they haven’t mapped the ecosystem—supply chain risks, partner certifications, software compatibility—they’ll be blindsided by delays, tariffs, or incompatibility. It’s like building a bridge without checking whether the ground can hold the weight.
Mapping as Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence (CI) is business’s equivalent of Ordnance Survey. It’s the disciplined, often unglamorous work of charting the environment so decision-makers don’t step into ambushes.
CI asks questions such as:
What new “terrain” is forming in my industry? (AI regulation, new standards, shifting buyer behavior)
Where are the choke points? (supply chain dependencies, scarce talent, rising costs)
What “cover” can I use? (alliances, certifications, unique data assets)
Where is the enemy exposed? (overpriced acquisitions, regulatory weakness, customer dissatisfaction)
Good CI isn’t just Google searches and competitive tear-downs. It’s building the map of reality—the shared picture leadership uses to decide where to invest, where to retreat, and how to outmaneuver.
The Cost of Not Knowing Your Ground
History is equally rich with disasters caused by ignoring the terrain.
In 1941, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union famously underestimated Russian winter. Troops marched with summer uniforms, tanks froze, and supply lines disintegrated. A basic failure to respect the environment derailed the campaign.
Businesses do the same. Consider the flood of Western retailers who tried to expand into China without understanding local consumer behavior or government regulation. They assumed the terrain would be like Europe or America. It wasn’t. Billions were lost.
Or the dozens of smartphone manufacturers in the late 2000s who thought hardware specs were the only battlefield. They ignored the “terrain” shift towards ecosystems and app stores. Apple and Google mapped that ground correctly; everyone else marched into a swamp.
Lessons from the Ordnance Survey
So, what does Ordnance Survey teach us about how to operate today? Three big takeaways:
1. Precision Matters More Than Averages
OS didn’t draw vague outlines. It measured every hedge, wall, and field boundary with obsessive accuracy. That allowed armies and engineers to make precise plans.
In business, precision is equally vital. Knowing that a “market is growing 10%” is about as useful as knowing “France is to the south.” You need granular data: which customer segments, which competitors, which regulations, which supply routes.
2. Update Relentlessly
A 20-year-old map is a curiosity, not a planning tool. OS constantly updated its data, especially during wartime when a new trench or bridge could appear overnight.
Your competitive map must be refreshed too. Competitors change pricing, new entrants appear, regulations shift. A once-a-year “landscape review” is like fighting World War I with Napoleonic maps.
3. Make It Accessible
OS maps weren’t locked in a vault; they were distributed to soldiers, engineers, and planners. Intelligence unused is intelligence wasted.
CI teams should ensure insights are consumable: dashboards, executive briefs, interactive maps. The point is to inform decisions, not to collect dust.
Bringing It Back to Business Strategy
The military invests so heavily in environmental intelligence because they know the battlefield punishes ignorance. The same applies in business.
Before you launch that product: map the competitive terrain.
Before you enter that market: understand the regulatory rivers and demographic ridges.
Before you scale that operation: survey the supply chain like an engineer inspects the soil before laying foundations.
Your competitors are doing this—or at least, the dangerous ones are. If you aren’t, you’re just hoping the terrain is kind. Spoiler: it rarely is.
Final Thought: Don’t Just March, Map
Strategy without landscape awareness is nothing more than wishful thinking. The British Army of the 18th century learned this the hard way and responded by building Ordnance Survey. Modern businesses should take note.
Competitive intelligence is your Ordnance Survey. It doesn’t guarantee victory—but it dramatically reduces the chance of blundering into disaster.
So, before you chase the next shiny trend, ask yourself: Do I actually know the ground I’m standing on? Because whether you’re storming a beach in Normandy or launching a product in London, the side with the better map usually wins.
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