When the Fog Rolls In, Do Leaders Need a Map or a Compass?

It didn’t go as planned. And when Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance were forced to abandon their icebound ship in October 1915, they were both off course and more than a thousand miles away from the nearest civilization. 

Over the following seven months, the crew traveled by foot and lifeboat to reach a whaling station on South Georgia Island. It was a harrowing journey that depended more than anything else on one small device: the compass. 

In a metaphorical sense, business leaders are familiar with these two navigational tools. The map is the business plan—a set of carefully drafted goals to guide future decision-making. The compass is the leader’s vision and values, providing direction when the unexpected occurs. 

Both are essential tools for guiding a company through good times and bad. But Julio M. Ottino, professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, says that many leaders fail to recognize when a map or a compass is more critical—or when they’re leaning too hard on one or the other. 

“The map and the compass are not rivals,” says Ottino, who is also the former dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern. “They are partners in a more demanding kind of navigation. Maps help organizations optimize within known terrain; compasses help leaders orient themselves when the terrain itself changes.” 

As today’s leaders squint at a future brimming with uncertainty—from AI to oil prices to political polarization—Ottino offers examples of what can happen when a company tilts too far towards the map or the compass, and how leaders can make sure they strike the most-effective balance. 

The map and the clock 

Mapping out the future with a business plan is an essential process for any business. A firm’s leadership will regularly determine their goals and next steps, then use that framework to guide their operations. 

“The easy thing to do is round up the troops and ask them where they want to go,” Ottino says. “We do this and then that.” 

This kind of methodical planning aligns with what philosopher Karl Popper called “clock thinking,” Ottino says. Both maps and clocks impose a structure of predictability on the world, whether it’s the possible routes between two points or the regular passage of time. Once this foundation is established, it’s simply a matter of optimizing the execution. 

Yet no matter how carefully a company drafts the map of its business plan, it can’t completely protect them from disaster. 

“Most people tend to think, ‘I’m going to make a plan, and this plan will tell us when we are here, we will be doing things to get there. And when we’re there ...,’” Ottino says. 

There’s a reason clock thinking is so common: it works extraordinarily well in stable, predictable, and largely closed systems. But increasingly, contemporary organizations operate in environments that are open, interconnected, and subject to cascading change. So the challenge is not merely incomplete information but an environment that is continuously reshaped through interaction and adaptation.  

This is where even the most accurate map can lead you astray. The risk of a company-ending calamity only increases in times of uncertainty, whether it’s caused by technology, new competition, or geopolitics. And yet, most companies respond to challenges and instability by falling back on clock thinking and reliance on the map, Ottino says. 

As a result, history is littered with cautionary tales of businesses that weren’t flexible enough—and paid the price. Kodak missed the shift to digital photography; Blockbuster underestimated the threat of Netflix’s home-delivery model. 

“Leaders stop asking where they are going and start asking whether they are on schedule,” he says. “When the terrain shifts—and in a complex world, it always shifts—the organization keeps following the map, because the map is what everyone agreed upon, what the board approved, what the incentives reward.” 

It’s a mistake that can permeate from a leader through the entire organization. Over-optimizing for the present—the epitome of clock thinking—risks leaving a company and its employees unprepared for the future. 

“You need to produce people who have the ability to deploy tools in a more complex ecosystem, otherwise you’ll be producing people who probably are well adapted to one moment in time, but they don’t have capacity of adaptation,” Ottino says. “Too much knowledge without really creative deployment is useless.” 

The compass and the cloud 

Many legendary business-success stories feature companies led not by sharp business plans but by leaders capable of adapting to uncertainty. Executives like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, and Lisa Su brought more than just skill in drafting an effective plan; they steered their companies with a confident internal compass of what should be done regardless of present-day conditions. 

But being a leader adept at “compass” navigation is about more than intuition or charisma. It is about having a framework grounded in values, judgment, and an understanding that in open, evolving systems, the future cannot be fully mapped when optimization and prediction become insufficient. 

Leaders in this mold are also good at what Popper called “cloud thinking”—a creative embrace of multiple future possibilities that allows them to adapt and nimbly maneuver the organizations they lead when they encounter unforeseen conditions. 

“You need leaders capable of articulating a compelling interpretation of how the world is evolving, so that others are willing to move forward even amid uncertainty,” Ottino says. 

The compass of a visionary leader can help their company navigate choppy waters. By trusting their instincts instead of clinging to what has worked in the past, they can help their companies turn challenges into opportunities. Think Jobs and the iPhone, or Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi refocusing the company from playing cards to video games. 

But a runaway compass can be its own kind of disaster. Ottino points to Theranos, WeWork, and the tech company Jawbone as recent examples. Jawbone’s founders pivoted from headphones to fitness trackers to health tech before the company collapsed in 2017—“a compass operating at a scale that required maps and finding none,” Ottino says. 

Without the map, it’s impossible to implement and scale even the best ideas, and employees may be discouraged by the whiplash of constantly shifting goals. 

“In complex systems, vision untethered from operational feedback can become delusion,” he says. “Without some connection between aspiration and reality, even the most compelling compass can lose its bearings.” 

It’s also possible to have the wrong kind of compass—one that focuses exclusively on profits over people. A leader’s compass doesn’t always have to be oriented toward innovation, Ottino says. It can also be based, as his Kellogg colleague Harry Kraemer advocates, on personal values. 

“Very few people come with a compass, and you cannot ask people, ‘define the compass for me,’” Ottino says. “It is a combination of strong beliefs on how you think the world is and operates and how much risk you’re willing to take.” 

How to juggle both tools 

The most effective leaders don’t just possess both a map and a compass, Ottino says; they also know which tool best fits the moment. It’s a decision that’s built on self-awareness. 

“It depends on the moment that you live in,” Ottino says. “So in today’s uncertain environment, for example, I would say that you should always be thinking, ‘Am I being too rigid? Am I going to my core strength too deeply?’ It all boils down to introspection.” 

The tendency of most leaders to play it safe and focus on maps and clock thinking during uncertainty sets up a counterintuitive opportunity for companies willing to lean on their compass and expand their creativity. 

“When the times are tough is the time in which you should pay the most attention to this dynamic,” Ottino says. “Since everybody will be going more to the clock, this may be an opportunity to acquire talent in the cloud, because the tendency is to go to the things that worked before.” 

For future leaders, business schools are often the best place to build your map-building skills. But leaders trained only to optimize within existing frameworks may excel in stable environments yet struggle when the landscape itself changes.  

This does not mean that business leaders need to become philosophers or landscape painters, Ottino notes. But finding and developing your compass may involve immersion in other disciplines. Exposure to the modes of thinking in other disciplines—science, engineering, art, literature, design—helps develop the intellectual flexibility required to navigate uncertainty, while comfort with multiple interpretations, incomplete information, contradiction, and evolving contexts is essential to leading within complex systems. 

“Having an education that involves some War and Peace and some humanities can subconsciously prepare you to deal with other things that are undetermined,” Ottino says. “By seeing how other people have developed their own compasses, you can get a sense of how to develop your own.”