Charting the Course: What Mapmakers and Storytellers Know About Change

“It is certain that there are lands here, but how many, and where their limits are, is uncertain." — Gerardus Mercator, inscribed on his 1538 world map

Gerardus Mercator’s 1538 world map, double cordiform projection, high-res version via Wikimedia Commons

Maps of unknown territory historically did two things at once: they told us the truth of where we were and made us want to go somewhere we’d never been.

Beyond the edge of the known world, the earliest cartographers, Mercator among them, filled the blank space, terra incognita, with wonder: sea monsters, unicorns, and lands of astonishing promise. These fantastical depictions were vivid enough to make people risk perilous seas for the chance of finding them. They were captivating.

But the question of whose hand held the pen always mattered. What went into that blank space, and why, was never a neutral choice. Behind every map lay a strategy, and the ambitions and motivations of people with the power to decide the direction of travel.

Modern-day organisational strategists know this too, and ideally, they account for it in their process. At its best, strategising is a collaborative act - one that galvanises the people involved to take ownership of their shared future and move together.

In this article, I want to explore strategy from a fresh angle and ask what it really takes to spark the bold, questing transformations they typically strive to deliver.

The mapmakers’ craft

“The good cartographer is both a scientist and an artist.” — Erwin Raisz, cartographer

Mapmaking is not a purely scientific exercise. It requires a clear purpose, solid data, and the creative judgment to select what matters while leaving other realities out. The same is true for strategy, and in my specific field, the strategic transformation of organisations and their brand cultures.

As we master our craft, we learn how to fuse data and insight with foresight, imagination, intuition and more to chart new courses of action for our clients.

We start by listening, working closely with senior decision-makers and their teams to read the context as it is, before exploring what could be.

We let our minds take flight, projecting into the future, trying pathways on, rejecting them, and checking our biases along the way.

We draw on lived experience and take soundings from the people who’ll live with the answer.

Only when we’re confident do we put pen to paper, drawing maps clear enough to capture our vision in steady sentences.

At the end, we hold the result up to the light and ask: does this feel right, and how are we going to land it?

Balancing IQ and EQ (and other intelligences)

Wally Olins was one of my first mentors in business and the art of brand strategy. He was a master of his craft with a famously low tolerance for flannel. He remains a hugely influential figure in our industry. In one of the last things he ever wrote, published the month he died, he made his challenge clear. It's a line I think about often.

"IQ is beating EQ. Right now, in the permanent struggle between analytics and intuition, data is winning. But the wheel will turn. It always does."— Wally Olins, ‘Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come’ (2014)

Reflecting recently on what I learned from Wally, it struck me that creating truly transformative strategies draws more on our EQ than our IQ. This is where their power lies. While robust data is crucial to our credibility, the questions we must answer along the way compel us to go beyond the empirical and the rational. That’s why strategy, even in the age of AI, must remain, at heart, a human process.

It begins with the people we work alongside. At Guillemot, many of our clients are doing their strategic thinking without a Chief Strategy Officer or in-house equivalent. Whatever their job title might be, they're courageous, forward-thinking leaders who believe in culture as a performance enabler, not an afterthought.

The brief might come from anywhere in the C-suite – from the CEO or Founder on behalf of the whole organisation or from Brand, People & Culture, or a specific part of the business where cultural change is critical to future performance and success.

The strategies we’re invited to help craft tend to focus on fundamental questions.

• Brand & Identity  —"Who are we, at our core?" "What makes us distinctive?"

• Target Audiences — "Who are we here to serve?" “What matters to them?”

• Vision — "Where are we heading?" "What's the world we want to see?"

• Purpose — "Why do we exist, and what value does that create?"

• Ambition & Goals — "What, specifically, do we want to achieve, and by when?"

• Culture & Values — "How will we work together?" and "What principles will guide us?"

When the course has been charted, we define how we will track performance, progress and impact, ideally across measures that cover financial, customer, people and planet.

Getting to a clear direction of travel doesn't just require data and IQ; it demands curiosity and courage, deep listening and discernment, empathy and intuition, judgment and imagination, right from the very beginning. If you're a strategist of any kind, these are important capabilities to cultivate.

Giving a taste for the sea

“Building a boat isn’t about weaving canvas, forging nails, or reading the sky. It’s about giving a shared taste for the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle (1948)

So, the strategy has been committed to paper, maybe even a beautifully visualised strategy-on-a-page infographic. But if all it took was good answers to these questions, ratified by the powers that be, to ignite the delivery of our strategies, why do so many strategic change initiatives fail?

We all know the much-cited statistic about the failure rate of change programmes, typically estimated at 60 to 70%. This statistic is slippery, with no clear attribution. A more compelling figure comes from research across 200+ companies, cited in Robert Kaplan and David Norton's 'The Strategy-Focused Organization' (2000). The creators of the Balanced Scorecard's research included this staggering finding:

“Only around 5% of employees understand their organisation’s strategy”

This means everyone else is making decisions without knowing what they’re working towards, let alone believing in the course the company is on or appreciating their part in it.

Strategic clarity is often the point of failure, and poor communication is often the culprit. A 2025 study by The Grossman Group, conducted with The Harris Poll, found that roughly 1 in 4 change efforts fail due to poor communication. The same study found a striking gap between perception and reality: leaders believed they were communicating well 82% of the time; employees agreed only 23% of the time. Closing this gap is essential if we want our strategies to take flight and be executed brilliantly and consistently by all involved.

Of course, this isn’t the full picture. Whole bodies of serious work exist on why change doesn’t ignite. There are internal systems at play within individuals, in teams, and across organisational and wider systemic structures. This piece looks at one piece of that puzzle: the story we tell, and how that lands and embeds itself enough to drive aligned action.

Connection is the watchword here. No strategy, however bold and beautiful, will leave the ground if we don’t connect it – intentionally and wholeheartedly – with the audience expected to make it real on the ground. There is too much at stake to skip this step, and the people doing the most vital work on the planet understand this best of all.

One recent example was a complete revelation to me. I can’t stop thinking about it.

The High Seas Treaty is a UN agreement to protect marine life in international waters, the roughly two-thirds of the ocean that falls outside any single nation’s jurisdiction. Its official objective, in the treaty’s own words, is “the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction,” or, more simply, looking after the ocean that belongs to no one and everyone at once. There were twenty years of negotiations across legal and technical domains. There were debates about data, jurisdiction, and who should benefit from what the ocean’s genes might one day be worth. But solid answers still weren’t enough to move nearly 200 nations to sign.

We’ll come back to what created the breakthrough, and why this mattered as much as the deal itself. For now, let’s say the people shaping this treaty clearly understood a universal truth about powerful communication: the content tells people where you’re going, but it doesn’t transport them there. For that, we need story.

Navigating with the ancients

Story works through four distinct appeals, known throughout human history. The first three were named two and a half thousand years ago by Aristotle: logos, the rational logic; ethos, the principles that build trust; pathos, the emotion we stir in our audience. The fourth, mythos, was named later, but it is equally ancient and essential.

Appeal 1: Logos – The rational argument that establishes credibility

Strategic failure is often a failure of form, not intelligence. A plan can be watertight, well-evidenced, and entirely correct, and still move no one, because being rationally persuaded and being inspired to act are not the same thing.

Most strategy decks lean almost entirely on logos, then wonder why nothing changes. Climate communication offers the starkest proof of this at civilisational scale.

For decades, scientists and governments built their cases on what researchers call the information deficit model – the assumption that giving people more facts and data would be enough to change their behaviour. This has been comprehensively shown not to work, particularly on hotly contested issues. Peer-reviewed research has even found that presenting people with facts contradicting what they already believe can backfire badly, hardening their original position rather than shifting it.

This is the value-action gap – the distance between what people know and what they do in practice. Forty years of logos, confidently repeated, still hasn’t closed this gap in climate communications. We need to go further.

Appeal 2: Ethos – The principles that build trust

Writing about a summer’s extreme heat, I once found two competing climate narratives jostling in my own feed: one apocalyptic and angry and one nostalgic and dismissive. Both clearly needed a villain. Both demanded that someone else change. Neither offered a pathway to action. What was missing wasn’t more facts or more fear; it was ethos - a voice people trust enough to hear and act on.

Purpose-led organisations are a good case in point. More than a decade of purpose-washing and performative gestures have left people tired of the claims. The fact is, purpose only earns trust when it’s been embedded and proven true over time.

Despite the backlash, the golden child in the movement has retained its crown. For five decades, Patagonia’s environmental mission shaped every material decision the company made, not as a marketing layer, but as the actual business logic, proving itself commercially again and again without ever needing outside capital’s blessing. This principled heritage gave founder Yvon Chouinard the credibility to make his boldest move yet. In 2022, he transferred ownership of the entire company to a trust and a nonprofit, so that, in his words, “Earth is now our only shareholder.”

Nobody doubted this strategic move was genuine, because nothing about the decision was new; it was the logical conclusion of fifty years of consistent behaviour. The narrative held.

That’s ethos in action. It's not persuading people you’re trustworthy in the moment; it's earning the right to be believed through consistently demonstrating our integrity.

Appeal 3: Pathos – The feelings we remember

In August 2026, Bill Gates released a short video trailer alongside his major essay on AI's risks, "The Turbulent AI Era Is Here."

In a LinkedIn post, communications designer Jeremy Connell-Waite broke the script down using Aristotelian appeals. The ethos came first, with a measured tone avoiding both evangelism and doom. Then logos, a clear structural argument. Only then pathos, the line that landed: “AI could stunt our kids’ development and replace human relationships.”

Suddenly, an abstract policy debate about compute and productivity became, in one sentence, a debate about our children. The audience became the protagonists; the story came home to roost.

Ethos and logos earn a leader the right to be heard. Pathos is what people remember.

Appeal 4: Mythos – Our shared story

There’s a fourth appeal: mythos. This is the shared story a group believes about itself. It tells us who we are, where we’re headed, and why that matters. Mythos is the beating heart of brand and culture, and the unifying force behind the best strategic narratives I've heard.

The historian and mythographer Marina Warner describes mythos as “a text in a state of constant metamorphosis.” Unlike logos, which is fixed and institutional, mythos is fluid and alive. It is imagination held in common. Vivid enough that people across generations, roles and backgrounds can picture themselves inside it in roughly the same way. It is our shared story, and the greatest galvaniser of them all.

Let’s return to the High Seas Treaty.

After twenty years of failed negotiations, deadlocks over data and legal frameworks, and discussions over who would benefit from what the ocean's genes might one day be worth, the world's nations finally agreed to the High Seas Treaty in March 2023, at the end of a two-week summit and 36 straight hours of continuous talks at the UN headquarters in New York. When consensus was reached, conference president Ambassador Rena Lee simply said: "The ship has reached the shore." The room broke into thunderous applause.

Twenty years of negotiation and hard-fought political compromises were captured in a single image."The ship has reached the shore" is the line that’s remembered, quoted, and retold. This is what the moment meant - the core of a story big and vivid enough that nearly 200 nations could picture themselves inside it, and picture themselves having arrived somewhere together. Of course, agreeing the treaty text was not the end of the story. It took another two and a half years for enough nations to ratify it into binding law. Meanwhile, campaigners kept the vision alive with a slogan of their own: “30x30,” the global commitment to protect 30% of the planet by 2030.

When the treaty entered into force on January 17th 2026, Greenpeace called it “the most significant ocean protection agreement in history.” The Revelator, an environmental publication of the Center for Biological Diversity, has since called “30x30” itself “arguably the most successful conservation slogan in history.” The strategy and the story were inextricably linked.

That’s mythos doing its job – keeping people together through a collective endeavour, even when the world has stopped watching.

The best test of a strategy is how far it travels

I’ve always believed the best test of a strategy is how far it travels.

A few years ago, I was part of a team helping an iconic hospitality brand scale its portfolio of hotels internationally. Rapid expansion was on the cards, and the leadership team was fully aware this could put pressure on their people and culture. Their culture was special. It was the reason guests kept coming back. In fact, it was so good, they'd never needed an expensive loyalty programme. Naturally, they wanted to protect this asset as they grew.

Nothing needed to be invented. The strategy was forged by surfacing what made them special, distilling it, and rebuilding every part of the talent experience around it. They then immersed every colleague - old and new - in that story. It was a triumph.

A few years later, I stayed the night in one of their London properties. By then the global rollout was complete, and the strategy was embedded across their culture, operations, and guest experience. Everything was aligned: recruitment, onboarding, communication rituals, employee recognition and more. When I mentioned in passing that I’d had a hand in the work, the front-of-house team lit up and spoke fluently about the strategy, unprompted. One team member said it was the reason she’d joined in the first place.

For me, that’s the real test of a strategy: not whether it’s a watertight, defensible, evidence-backed framework, but whether the direction and principles at its core resonate with people, and are still being carried and enacted by people years later.

Strategising, much like map-making and storytelling, is rarely a solo pursuit; it's a collaborative act and conversation with our audiences, whether we design it that way or not. The outputs will be interpreted, argued over, corrected, and redrawn by everyone with a part to play in them. When we bring our audiences into the centre and make them the heroes, we create the shared agency and ownership needed for aligned strategic change.

If your organisation’s strategy is living in a deck and not yet in how your people view, experience, and talk about their work, that’s the gap our Charting the Course service exists to close. Get in touch to explore how we could approach this together.

Steph Matthews is the founder of Guillemot, an independent change consultancy helping founders and leadership teams evolve their organisations and create the cultures their strategies demand. Read more about Guillemot at www.guillemot-consulting.com.