Wayfinding: How to Move Forward in an Uncertain World

Navigate complex, constantly changing situations by incrementally adapting your course through a series of small, low risk steps each of which reveals helpful insight.

Customer journeys are more like a child’s scribble than a straight line. To keep up, marketers need frequent check-ins and adaptations to strategy.

Imagine this common scenario: you enter an immense building for the first time, looking for the offices of a specific company or a recovering friend’s hospital room. Finding your way can be tricky. Yet, you move forward, confident you’ll figure things out. And you will! By using a discovery-oriented sequence of steps that interior designers call wayfinding.

Here’s how wayfinding works: Take a small step, look at the outcome to assess what did or didn’t work, adjust your direction accordingly, then take your next step. Wayfinding improves the accuracy of motion and reduces the risk of error. Wayfinding can be used to navigate other uncertain situations including adjusting to customer journeys, business planning in dynamic markets, and exploring career or post-career directions.

Three Smart Steps to Navigating Uncertainty

Step 1: Act – Take a “best guess” first step

Adopt a bias toward action. When entering an unfamiliar building, you wouldn’t freeze at the door. In an uncertain environment, you don’t get smarter by waiting. Of course, you want to gather some information but don’t wait too long. For one thing – no matter how much information you gain ahead of time you won’t know if it is right or enough. As a marketer I know humorously commented on a LinkedIn post, “It’s like someone is about to be run over by a giant boulder, and everyone is screaming ‘Run!’ and the person is saying, ‘Wait, I’m trying to fully grasp the situation.’” Waiting too long means things will have changed by the time you act virtually ensuring a disappointing outcome.

The ideal wayfinding steps are relatively small, low risk, and intended to reveal helpful insight. Examples of exploratory steps include:

In an unfamiliar building: Look for a sign or a suite number to orient your position.
In a changing marketplace: Conduct a pilot campaign to learn what customers currently care about and how they would react to something new.
With a new product: Develop a minimum viable solution and introduce it to a small group who can give feedback.
Making a career change: Take on a side project to give you an idea of what you might enjoy, what you would be good at, and how much opportunity there is in the market.

Step 2 - Learn: Vigilantly observe and analyze your experience.

Consider any action you take in an uncertain environment to be a hypothesis. The Oxford dictionary defines a hypothesis as “a supposition made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.” Wayfinding emphasizes intelligence and analysis to aid inevitable course correction.

Early Polynesian explorers used a type of wayfinding when they island-hopped in the vast Pacific Ocean using no technical guidance tools. As the Polynesian explorers navigated, along the way they gathered situational knowledge from the sun and stars and from the behavior of porpoises, seagulls, and wave patterns to inform their direction.

Early in the COVID pandemic when no one could predict the future of in-person events, one company hinged their planning cadence on milestones versus calendar. Rather than attempt to develop a precise policy for their big events, they made small bets and redirected choices one milestone at a time. Their first decision came early in the spring of 2020, when they faced whether to put a large down payment on a hotel block for an October partner event in Germany. They decided to pause that event, monitor the situation, and periodically revisit their decision.

Step 3–Adapt: Modify your plan based on what you’ve learned.

Eventually, the company cut their big event format altogether as it was just too risky under the unusually unpredictable situation. As they emerged back into in-person events they favored smaller regional and hybrid formats that could be tailored to the unique situations in various countries.

The goal of adaptation isn’t to find the perfect answer once and for all. Instead, you will take a series of incremental steps, each informed by the information you just gathered. In the unknown building scenario, once you locate the suite number on the lobby sign, you must still hunt for the elevator, arrive at the correct floor, turn left, realize you should have gone right, walk down a unexpectedly long hallway, look around for a helpful bystander to assure that you are headed in the right direction and so on until you arrive at your desired location.

Act-learn-adapt.

Three things not to do in the face of uncertainty

Freeze: Many people freeze in the face of change for fear of making a big mistake. Here’s the truth: You will make mistakes because there are limits to your foresight. More information helps, but there is no way you can ever perfectly predict. Many brilliant inventors and leaders remind us not to give up. I like this quote by Irish writer, James Joyce, “Mistakes are the portal of discovery.” With wayfinding, your mistakes will be comparatively small, and you will learn from them.

Assume things have (or will) stopped changing. Life rarely thrusts boulder requiring radical transformations onto one’s path. It’s easy, especially for experienced people, to gloss over small changes and assume things are the same. But nothing stays the same. Market changes, for example, tend to be maddeningly faint yet constant, like rivers as they carve canyons. Effective marketing can be boring, a CMO once told me, because it works best to develop a consistent stream of small changes rather than exciting but risky “big bang” projects. It’s only in hindsight we see how different things have become, and by then, recovery is expensive. The guidance is to continually wayfind rather than viewing the effort as temporary.

Expect linear change. In stable situations, where change is very slow, it may be okay to move forward informed only by your past experiences or by restricting your information to what is going on now. But slow change is rare in today’s messy, complex, world. Complex environments are subject to non-linearity (the butterfly effect) so assuming that the future will simply be an extension of today is a major error. You must keep checking in and adapting. For example, when it comes to career planning, assume that the job you will have in ten years doesn’t exist today and that consistent lifetime learning is needed if you expect to be successful when you arrive in your next decade.

In life, in marketing, and in navigating the physical world, wayfinding will bring you more in tune with the changes constantly surrounding us and you are more likely to find the pot of gold at the end of your journey.