Is your team tacking without a map?

Marcin Wadas in a red life vest on deck, looking out across the Baltic on a bright day — On deck in the Bay of Puck — where a two-dimensional chart demands three-dimensional thinking.

Picture a captain who tells the crew at the start of a voyage, “We’re sailing to Island X!”, shoves the nautical chart into his pocket, and only comes back a year later to check if they made it.

In business, we call this an “annual performance review” and pretend everything is fine. At sea, that strategy ends in disaster. Here’s how combining a cycling watch, sailing, and business kept me from hitting the rocks.

Crew gathered around the saloon table of a yacht while the skipper points at a paper chart spread out with dividers, a plotter and a pencil — Chart work below deck: the plan, before any of it meets the wind.

Before my first training sail on the Baltic Sea, I’d never really thought about what a nautical chart looks like. As it turns out, the Baltic quickly teaches you that a two-dimensional map requires three-dimensional thinking—especially around the Bay of Puck, where the depth can suddenly drop below a single meter. It might seem like plotting a course at sea is just drawing a straight line between two ports. Nothing could be further from the truth.

During a stretch of bad weather, I was lucky enough to take part in a practical navigation and chart-reading course. That’s when I managed to bridge two worlds: cycling and sailing. Using my smartwatch, I recorded GPS tracks from our sails and overlaid them directly onto the captain’s original route plan. A pretty neat feature!

Nautical chart of the Gulf of Gdansk showing Gdynia, Sopot and Westerplatte with depth soundings, buoys, port limits and approach bearings — The chart itself: depths, marks, port limits and bearings — every number you need to know where you actually are.

And that got me thinking: map, plan, wind, and weather assumptions vs. actual execution layered right on top. After all, isn’t that the very essence of management?

At the start of the year or quarter, we outline the goals we want to hit and set the famous KPIs. Then months go by—filled with putting out fires, solving daily problems, and grinding away—and only at the very end do we check whether we actually made it.

Can you imagine doing that at sea? Waiting until the end of the voyage to check where you ended up? Most expeditions like that would end in catastrophe.

Navigation is simply a transparent system that tells you exactly where you are at any given moment. Sure, today we have GPS and interactive charts, but navigation worked hundreds of years ago, too—the tools were just harder to learn and less accessible. Which only proves one thing: in today’s world, the lack of transparent goal tracking in business is downright criminal. It has never been easier. Making decisions when you have a clear picture in front of you is infinitely simpler and keeps risk to a minimum.

If you set a goal without providing the tools to track it, you’re just like that captain leaving his crew without a map. If your team is smart, they’ll probably figure something out—you can always look around and rely on a basic wrist compass.

It’s just that before you finally reach port, your actual route might look a little like this:

Map of the Bay of Puck with a recorded GPS track looping and zig-zagging back on itself between Gdynia, Rewa and the Hel peninsula — The recorded track from the watch, laid over the bay. The plan was a line; the voyage was this.