The Strategic Game Board.

Nobody announces the stage transitions on a platform arc. You have to read them from the evidence, the same way a crew reads its position from instruments rather than from the view out the canopy. One tool helps me do that. I call it the strategic game board.

Lay out every player in your market on one page. Draw more than one axis, using the forces that matter in your field. Then look at where you sit. Are you in white space, or in a crowded space? A board full of look-alike competitors clustered together usually means consolidation has started.

That line is my answer to the last debrief question after the 2000 crash: what will we do differently? We had mistaken a hot market for proof of our plan. The board is how I keep that from happening twice.

The board also names your buyer

At WiseWire, the board showed Yahoo, Lycos and Excite. Yahoo already had a directory. Lycos had none. At Affinnova, the board showed Nielsen’s BASES, a linear forecasting system. Both times the board named the natural owner before the company had proved anything.

The same board tells you who needs you most.

Current tools for the same job

Two modern methods do related work. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s strategy canvas, from Blue Ocean Strategy, plots how each competitor invests across the factors an industry competes on, so look-alike strategies show up as overlapping lines. Simon Wardley’s maps place each part of a value chain on an axis of evolution, from novel to commodity, which shows where a market is moving. Porter’s test applies to all of them. If your position looks like everyone else’s, you do not have a strategy yet.

Draw your board

1. Pick two forcesChoose the axes that matter in your field, not the ones from a textbook.
2. Place every playerCompetitors, incumbents, likely buyers and the companies building the infrastructure. All on one page.
3. Read the clustersLook-alike competitors bunched together usually mean consolidation has started.
4. Circle who needs you mostFind the player with the missing piece. That is your likely natural owner.
5. Redraw it oftenPositions move. Aim your strategy at the world as it is, not as it was when you started.