Too much data will not improve business strategy for most companies

I need to remind this post of Simon Wardley’s blog which contains a great explanation of how to define a strategy, how to assess it.

“Situational awareness: the strategy always starts from WHERE, then you can clearly articulate WHY you are making a specific choice.”

“Using visual representation (the board, the map) to articulate encounters both present and past, you learn from those visualizations to anticipate others moves and prepare counters.”

The best part of the article is the one which explain how the people with low understanding of the situation acts:

“Those with low levels of situational awareness often talk about the HOW, WHAT and WHEN of action (e.g. the combination of presses). They tend to focus on execution as the key. They poorly articulate the WHY having little or no understanding of potential WHEREs.”

To me the use of big-data in strategy without situational awareness is similar to the use of technical analysis in stock-market without a fundamental analysis of a given company: it’s just an theoretical exercise based in the past.