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# Step #3 POSITION: Know thyself
- URL: https://dreamsxmachina.com/position/
- Published: 2025-06-29T18:48:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T14:00:38.000Z
- Description: POSITION is about understanding the ecosystem your company actually inhabits, measuring the change it creates, and identifying the strategic position from which it can most meaningfully shape that world.
- Author: Ioan
- Tags: Tech Architecture, Umwelt, Adaptive Strategy, Adjacent Possible

Every business selects a portion of reality to pay attention to. It identifies certain people as customers, certain problems as relevant, certain technologies as useful, certain competitors as threats, and certain changes as opportunities. Everything outside that frame becomes background noise.

POSITION is the discipline of understanding the world in which your company actually exists. Not the market category you have inherited, and not the world you wish existed.

## The world according to the organism

The biologist **Jakob von Uexküll** introduced the concept of the **Umwelt**: the experienced environment of an organism. A tick does not experience “a forest” in the same way a human does. It responds to a much smaller set of meaningful signals: the smell of a host, temperature, gravity, touch. Its Umwelt is therefore not simply the objective environment around it. It is the environment as *perceived and acted upon by the organism*.

Businesses work in much the same way. A startup does not operate in “the economy.” It operates in the portion of the economy that its technology, people, customers, capital, reputation, regulations and capabilities allow it to perceive and influence. Two companies can occupy the same physical market and inhabit completely different Umwelten.

A fashion company may experience AI as a threat to creative labor. Another may experience it as an opportunity to radically reduce sampling costs. A third may barely notice it because its real constraint is distribution. The technology is the same. The Umwelt is not.

## Size doesn't matter

A company can have enormous ambition and very little actual influence. Conversely, a small company can occupy a surprisingly consequential position inside a much larger ecosystem.

A company selling software to architects is not merely participating in a software market. It may be participating in a much larger system involving construction economics, planning regulations, climate adaptation, procurement practices, professional education, material supply chains and the changing economics of architectural labor. Those systems can create constraints but they can also create leverage.

The company that understands the system can **change and optimize its position within the system**. That is where strategic opportunity begins.

## The timescale of impact

Position also has a temporal dimension because not all effects happen at the same speed. A marketing campaign may change behavior tomorrow. A new software product may change an organization's workflow over six months. A change in professional practice may take five years. A change in an urban environment may take decades. This matters because companies frequently measure themselves against a timescale that is convenient rather than consequential.

We therefore ask: **Over what timescale does this company create its deepest change?** And: **What needs to happen today for that longer-term change to become possible?**

A business that continually destroys the conditions of its own success is not sustainable, even if its balance sheet currently looks healthy. A business that strengthens the ecosystem on which it depends may possess a much more durable position than its current financial metrics reveal.

## A company as an ecological actor

Once the causal footprint becomes visible, the competitive landscape begins to look different. Competitors are **actors capable of producing similar changes in the same Umwelt**. A competitor might therefore be:

- another company;
- a platform;
- an open-source community;
- a regulatory change;
- a new technology;
- a customer's internal team;
- a changing cultural practice;
- or even a new behavior that makes the existing category less relevant.

A startup rarely wins because it possesses more resources than its largest competitors. It can, however, sometimes win because it occupies a different position in the system. POSITION is therefore not about finding the largest territory to occupy. It is about finding the position from which you can exert disproportionate influence.

## The Umwelt Map

This is what the **Umwelt Map** makes visible. Rather than producing another generic market landscape, we construct a specific map of the world in which the company operates. At its center is the company as an agent within a system. Around it we identify:

**Actors**  
Customers, competitors, suppliers, partners, institutions, communities, platforms and other organizations capable of influencing the system.

**Forces**  
Economic, technological, social, cultural, environmental and political forces acting upon those actors.

**Dependencies**  
The resources, infrastructures, technologies and relationships on which the company depends.

**Effects**  
The observable changes produced by the company's activities.

**Feedback loops**  
Places where the company's actions change the environment, which subsequently changes the conditions under which the company operates.

**Time horizons**  
Where effects appear immediately, where they compound, and where they may take years to become visible.

**Leverage points**  
Places where relatively small interventions can produce disproportionately large changes.

The resulting map is **a model of the company's agency within the market.**