Wayfinding, Virtual Worlds, and the Success of New Enterprises

Bob Jacobson, Ph.D.© 2004 Bluefire Consulting

For new businesses, finding their way is critical to their survival, let alone theirsuccess. But how can they in an uncertain world, starting with limitedknowledge, and no means – so they think – for acquiring a more completeunderstanding of the world as it is?

Prior experience is an unreliable guide for a pioneering company – and toolslike market research, one-dimensional and backward facing, paint a verysketchy, often misleading portrait of business realities.

Finding our way is a most basic human behavior in which most of us engagealmost unconsciously, responding only to those cues that are most evident inour immediate environment, that which we are prepared to see.

These cues are often misleading. We may interpret them incorrectly. Or, wemay fail to perceive additional cues that may provide context or becontradictory. The “virtual worlds” that organize our thoughts and actions, ifbased on a foundation of only partial awareness, are like funhouse mirrors thatreflect the world distorted, rather than as it is. Our task is to build dynamicvirtual worlds that accurately depict the world as it is and which can be used toplan our paths to success.

Doing business is like navigating a labyrinth…in multiple dimensions, dynamically.

No wonder so many new companies die before they know what hit them. Notable to find their way, they stagger in circles, burn cash, lose team members,and expire from exhaustion or walk off a cliff.

There is an answer.

Wayfinding is a methodology for understanding the world and getting around init. It has other names that may be more familiar. Wayfinding at sea or in theair is called navigation. In nature, competitive wayfinding is known asorienteering.

Polynesians for hundreds of yearshave been expert oceanic wayfinders.

Employed by geographers, architects, environmental designers, and otherswhose focus is on spatial awareness, wayfinding helps individuals to discoverwhere they’re at and how to get where they want to go. Wayfinding describeshow people perceive and orient themselves to landmarks and other features inthe environment. It prescribes how to facilitate this process using natural andartificial devices.

The most obvious manifestation of contemporary wayfinding is the layout ofpublic places to manage crowd flow, and the signage that enables visitors toquickly discover their location and destination.

A typical geographic wayfinding map.

In business, however, there are no designers and no signs to show the way. Sohow is wayfinding valuable to the founder/CEO and his or her shareholders?Because the executive who employs this most powerful innate skill – the abilityto perceive, understand, and act in the world around us – has a distinctivecompetitive advantage over executives who are still struggling to make senseof things based only on reports and spreadsheets.

The fact is, the ability to wayfind has been part of human experience since thefirst hominid migrations. Before there were compasses and sea-going clocks(for telling latitude), Polynesian navigators were crossing vast ocean reachesliterally by the seat of their muumuus. Sensing the tides under their keels,learning to navigate by the stars when they were visible and the wind andclouds when they were not, and paying special attention to the behavior ofseabirds and sea creatures, these explorers in their open canoes settled theentire South Pacific – no mean feat! We inherently know how to find our way.We just need to look for the right environmental cues.

We do business constantly invoking spatial metaphors. The spatial metaphorswe use for getting around in the physical world are powerful tools forexpressing relationships in the business environment. Unconsciously, theyguide us in what to look for, to find our way.

Spatial metaphors express our world.

A simple example is the concept of the business “field,” meaning a virtual“place” where companies contend with one another for supremacy andsuccess. When we talk about the “competitive landscape” and “defensible” IP,we imply a system of virtual ramparts and moats whose strength and integritywill be tested in the “field.” A complete list of spatial metaphors used in

business (with new ones being invented all of the time) would be lengthy – andspeak volumes about the current state of the business mind.

Linguists tell us that 80 percent of all spatial metaphors – phrases like, “overthe hill” – are shared by cultures across the board, because our humanexperiences are fundamentally alike. Because cultures vary, however, theremaining 20 percent of spatial metaphors are quite different. The Inuit havedozens of words for snow, for example. We have one. In the Arctic, without aguide, despite an abundance of resources, we would die.

The same is true of business cultures. Company leaders must be aware of theunique, even idiosyncratic metaphors characteristic of their business. Thesemetaphors shape how they think about business. Being aware of this bias mayenable the company to “out-wayfind” competitors in its niche.

Not all business metaphors are spatial. For example, in investment parlance,to “ratchet down” is a mechanical metaphor. The inevitable allusion to thethumbscrew is not far off the mark.

But for the purposes of wayfinding, it’s our ability to use spatial metaphorsthat matters. Here’s how it’s done.

Our goal is to compose an accurate interior virtual world that is a reliable basisfor decisionmaking – and not a singular vision, but rather a dynamic model thatcan be employed by anyone in the company, keeping everyone informed andaligned. According to Senge, the virtual world is also a place wherein thecompany can assimilate information, test assumptions, and become a truelearning organization.

With wayfinding methods we can compose this rich model and use it to directthe enterprise.1

1 Urban design theoreticians and practitioners have contributed the most to our understandingof wayfinding, its relation to the real and virtual environments, and the convergence of thetwo in design prescriptions for desirable real world solutions. Wayfinding is most thoroughlydescribed in the work of Canadians Arthur Frank and Romedi Passini, especially in theirsummary treatise, Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture (McGraw-Hill 1992). KevinLynch’s groundbreaking Images of the City (MIT Press 1964) laid out a methodology forcapturing the emotionally salient features of a place, incorporated in mental maps; R.M. Downsand David Stea explored cognitive filters associated with mental maps in Images andEnvironment (Aldine 1973). Christopher Alexander and his student team compiled A PatternLanguage (Oxford University Press 1977), the first of several schemas proposed for ideal,human-centric environments.

Each of these pioneering works has engendered a growing corpus of work, some of it – like thispaper – veering from conventional urban design into other fields, like business cognition. Threecontemporary geographers – Max Egenhofer (U of Maine), Andrew Frank (Tech U of Vienna), andDavid Mark (SUNY Buffalo) are leaders in this “new geography,” exploring such topics as

A virtual world, like real world, has multiple dimensions; it comprises multiple“strata,” or layers, of phenomena, populated by a variety of features(organizations, technologies, events, environmental conditions, and so forth).In the case of business, features in the virtual world may have geospatialreferents; but they may also exist in non-geographical spaces that do notcorrespond to earthly locations – “places in the mind.” It’s our job to discoverhow these features constitute a virtual world, and choose the most importantamong them, so that we can map our way to success.

Strata in the physical world.

The following strata (and more) are relevant to wayfinding in a businessenvironment. I’ve listed these because they’re categorically representative:

• The competitive landscape• Technology trends and developments• Company internal happenings• The financial market and capital flows• Politico-economic trends and fault lines• The industrial ether• Fusion events (synergistic or “nova” moments)

These strata are dynamic; their features interact. Some strata, like thecompetitive landscape, are easily defined and densely packed with discretefeatures. Others, like the “industrial ether,” are almost gaseous, hints ofoccurrence that may be far off or diffuse, whose reverberations are felt weaklyor are yet to be encountered.

“vernacular geography,” realistic GIS (geographical information systems), and the geospatialorigins of knowledge generally.

Our passage among these strata is directional: we move forward, but alsosometimes sideways, with time. To correctly survey the strata and find ourway, we can use these parameters to characterize and evaluate their features(again, this is an indicative, not exhaustive, list):

• Salience and significance• Distance and proximity• Volatility (velocity of change)• Duration and temporality• Affordability (can we affect the feature?)• Consequence (the feature’s meaning)

As we set about the process of mapping a virtual world that represents the realworld (in this case, the real world of business), it’s easy to appreciate howweak spreadsheets and published reports are as representations of the realworld. This is true even within the thin slices of reality – for example,company and suppliers’ inventories – that typical real-time information systemspurport to accurately represent.

For our virtual-world building and wayfinding to be highly effective, we requiremultidimensional surveying and analytical tools, and displays that can richlyportray the results of their calculations. Such tools will make wayfinding invirtual worlds a highly scalable management activity. In some cases, theirdevelopment is in progress. But building virtual worlds on which we can rely,even without optimal tools, is useful for two reason:

1. It raises our awareness of the environment and disciplines our ability todetect strata and react to their features.

2. Even an imperfect virtual world, so long as its limitations are known, ismore useful for wayfinding than no virtual world at all, or onethoughtlessly constructed, is better than no virtual world.

For now, one-off representations built on poster paper, spreadsheets, and flat-screen displays are adequate. When we have the tools we need, wayfindingwithin virtual worlds will become the next-generation management paradigm.The combination of wayfinding/virtual worlds methodologies with scenarioanalysis and Boolean algebra – the rule of intuitive statistics – we will definethe 21st Century’s first new management paradigm.

To build our virtual world, we first define the terrain, the underlying economicsituation in which our business must operate. This terrain, like a physicalterrain, is dynamic, though often at a pace and in dimensions that elude humandetection. Fortunately, we have tools for describing the economic terrain justas geographers can map tectonic movements in the physical world.

We next determine the strata for which this terrain is the foundation and theobjects that populate each stratum: companies, technologies, political events,and so forth. We characterize these objects in terms of the features describedabove and also their interaction. It’s important to quantify these relationships,even if they are subjectively perceived, so that our experiential map is anaccurate representation of the business environment.

Using a multidimensional “spreadsheet,” we can then create a cockpit withcharts, graphs, “radar,” and controls for manipulating the virtual world we arebuilding and navigating. This cockpit need not be literal. We can work at acomputer and input variables with more conventional outputs available to us,as we do in scenario analysis.

But constructing an actual virtual world offers us a chance to use our fullsensorium to determine where we’re at and where we intend to be going.Then it’s a matter of plotting an optimal path, with as few hazards and pitfallsas possible. As we move along the path, variables that relate the objects inthe virtual world change to reflect business rules that embody ourunderstanding of how things work, to the best of our knowledge.

Today’s business planning environment…

…And tomorrow’s!

Business wayfinding is an art informed by science. As computer-based tools forwayfinding improve, the practice will become rationalized and easier to teachand learn. For now, however, executives can employ wayfinding specialists tohelp them find their way in an ever more complex, potentially confusingbusiness environment.

Wayfinding is a new paradigm for business strategy and management:powerful, exciting to implement, and well worth the effort.