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 thought to bridge two worlds: cycling and sailing. Using my smartwatch, I recorded GPS tracks (exactly as I do it on a gravel bike) 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.

How I see it

Take a goal focused on acquiring expertise or taking over a specialization — a topic I’ve been working on for the past few years.

Sometimes, a company hires one person who can handle a niche task that requires deep domain knowledge and experience — the kind of skill you won’t learn on LinkedIn Learning or from an internal training catalog. Even if you assign this “competence handover” using the SMART methodology:

Specific. The employee independently and flawlessly creates complete product specifications for new items.

Measurable. Prepares 5 complete specifications that pass approval without substantive revisions.

Achievable. Transitions from passive observation and support to full independence within 12 weeks.

Relevant. Relies on existing templates, mentor support, and a gradual increase in task difficulty.

Time-bound. Exactly 3 months from the start date.

There’s a high chance they’ll get stuck at step one because they won’t even know where to start. Or they’ll call the resident expert, share the idea, and hear — at best — “Okay, so how can I help you?”

First, you need to carve out dedicated time solely for this task; otherwise, fires and escalations will take over. So, the employee gets a protective umbrella to focus on tasks that are Important/Not Urgent (based on Eisenhower’s matrix). This is our first “map”: checking weekly if the scheduled time was actually spent on the project, and reacting immediately if it wasn’t. Important/Not Urgent tasks are easily pushed aside by Important/Urgent (or worse, Unimportant/Urgent) ones, and you simply can’t let that happen.

The second aspect is the step-by-step roadmap. You start with “you don’t know what you don’t know”, but you can set a rule that each step takes no more than one workday.

Breaking this task down into smaller, binary steps (where there’s zero doubt whether they’re finished) is crucial:

Draw a schematic of the test bench after consulting the expert
Prepare a list of components to buy for the test bench
Order components
Prepare a rough sketch of the bench for the designer
Create a 3D model of the bench
Prepare execution drawings
3D print the parts…

Build the test bench

From a list like this, you can build a simple “progress bar”. With 12 weeks to hit the goal, it becomes easy to see if your timeline is slipping. Plus, a detailed list makes it effortless to delegate subtasks (purchasing, 3D design, etc.) to the right people, allowing your “soon-to-be local expert” to stay focused on what matters most.

Be ready for bumps in the road. In my experience, I’ve usually been able to announce a successful competence handover on time, but the path was never identical to day one’s plan.

To borrow a sailing analogy: when the wind shifts, you adjust your course. As long as you know where you are (tracking time spent, keeping priorities straight, and having a clear list of next steps) and make decisions with the end goal in mind, you’ll be just fine.

A plan structured like this can be reported in just two clear charts.

The first is the umbrella: sixteen hours a week set aside for the handover, and a note every Friday of what actually went in.

The umbrella: time set aside, time actually spent

192 h planned · 188 h logged · 4 h short

Cumulative

Per week

Plan
Logged
At or ahead of plan
Behind plan

The numbers

Hours per week and the running total, against sixteen protected hours a week.
Week	Plan	Logged	Plan Σ	Logged Σ	Δ
1	16	22	16	22	+6
2	16	13	32	35	+3
3	16	17	48	52	+4
4	16	15	64	67	+3
5	16	16	80	83	+3
6	16	20	96	103	+7
7	16	9	112	112	0
8	16	6	128	118	−10
9	16	0	144	118	−26
10	16	23	160	141	−19
11	16	17	176	158	−18
12	16	30	192	188	−4
Total	192	188			−4

The first map, drawn from a calendar instead of a bay. The plan is the straight line; the hours actually booked are the track. Weeks 8 and 9 are where the umbrella leaked — visible on the Friday it happened, not in the review three months later.

The second is the progress bar: twenty-four binary steps, two a week, none of them longer than a day.

The progress bar: binary steps, closed week by week

24 steps · 12 weeks planned · 14 weeks taken

Week 12 · 92% · 2 steps behind plan

Done 22 / 24

Plan 24 / 24

Plan
At or ahead of plan
Behind plan

The numbers

Steps closed per week and the running total, against a plan of two a week through week 12.
Week	Plan	Done	Plan Σ	Done Σ	Δ
1	2	2	2	2	0
2	2	4	4	6	+2
3	2	1	6	7	+1
4	2	2	8	9	+1
5	2	0	10	9	−1
6	2	2	12	11	−1
7	2	1	14	12	−2
8	2	2	16	14	−2
9	2	2	18	16	−2
10	2	2	20	18	−2
11	2	2	22	20	−2
12	2	2	24	22	−2
13	0	1	24	23	−1
14	0	1	24	24	0
Total	24	24			0

The second map, and the one a team actually watches. Every step is small enough to finish in a day, so “done” is never a matter of opinion. The two bars come apart at week 5, the week nothing closed, and never quite meet again: the plan fills up at week 12, the real one not until 14.

The effort came in on budget — 188 hours against 192, a rounding error. The scope did not: the last step closed in week fourteen, two weeks after the plan bar had filled up. Read once, at the end, neither number tells you anything. Read every Friday, the hours flag the trouble in weeks eight and nine, and the steps put a price on it. Same numbers; the only difference is when you looked at them.

Looking at the end result, it seems obvious — and that’s the point. The best solutions are the ones that look simple and obvious once you see them.