Every organisation has objects that tell its story. Some have products. Some have logos. Some have buildings you could point to and say, that's who we are. My organisation is different. If someone asked me to describe The Digital Strategist using a single object, I wouldn't reach for a laptop, a dashboard, or a company logo. I'd reach for a single black chess queen, standing alone on an empty board.

Not because I play chess professionally. I don't. But because the queen is the piece that captures what strategy has actually meant in my career: thinking several moves ahead, and being willing to move in whatever direction the position demands.

The Object

On a chessboard, every piece is confined to a shape. The bishop is locked to its diagonals. The rook owns its rows and columns. Even the king, for all its importance, can only move one square at a time, hedged in by the need to stay protected. The queen is different. It can move any number of squares in any direction, horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, because it trades protection for range. It is the piece expected to cover the most ground and adapt to whatever the board becomes.

I could have chosen the king. It's the more obvious symbol for anyone building a personal brand, the piece everything else exists to protect, the one whose name the whole game is named after. But the king's value comes from staying safe, not from doing the work. The queen is the piece that actually does something with its position. It has to be willing to cross the board, to sit exposed in the middle of a fight, to be the answer to whatever problem the position throws up next. That felt closer to how strategy actually works in practice than a piece whose main job is survival.

That range is what I recognised in my own career. From working at Microsoft, to leading digital transformation projects at the Saudi Muaythai Federation, to studying Business Administration at the University of London, to building early-stage ventures like Evonaro, none of these looked alike from the outside. Some weeks that meant writing specifications for a system nobody had built before. Other weeks it meant sitting across from a federation board explaining why a process needed to change before the software could. Other weeks it meant going back to first principles in a lecture hall, relearning the theory behind decisions I'd already been making on instinct. None of it followed a straight line, and none of it demanded the same skill twice. But they all demanded the same underlying instinct: the ability to move in whatever direction a problem required, not the direction I'd originally planned for. Success rarely came from one brilliant move. It came from positioning, preparation, patience, and understanding the board before deciding anything.

Anticipating The Next Ten Moves

Every project begins in some form of uncertainty. Unfamiliar technology. Stakeholders with different priorities. Limited budgets. Requirements that shift halfway through. Risks nobody flagged at the start. It would be easy to treat each of these as a problem to react to as it appears. That isn't strategy, it's just damage control with better timing.

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A strategist doesn't react to the next move. A strategist anticipates the next ten.

Like a queen on the board, every decision changes what becomes possible next. Sometimes sacrificing a short-term opportunity builds a stronger long-term position. Sometimes the strongest move available is to wait. And sometimes, the best decision is choosing not to move at all, letting a position mature before committing to it. None of that is indecision. It's the same discipline that separates a strategist from someone who is simply busy.

I've watched this play out the same way on very different boards. A project that looks stalled from the outside is sometimes just waiting for one dependency to resolve before ten other things can move at once. A conversation that looks like it went nowhere is sometimes the move that prevents a much larger conflict three steps later. The people who struggle most in these moments are rarely the ones without ideas. They're the ones who mistake activity for progress, who make a move just to feel like something happened. A queen that moves without a reason isn't being aggressive. It's just leaving itself exposed.

What The Digital Strategist Actually Means

The name is easy to misread. The Digital Strategist isn't about websites, software, AI, or any specific piece of technology. Those are tools, and tools change every few years. What doesn't change is the actual mission underneath them.

• See the patterns other people miss
• Simplify complexity instead of adding to it
• Solve the problem underneath the problem
• Build systems that keep creating value long after the project ends

The queen reminds me that every project, organisation, and career is simply another game of strategic thinking, and every move matters, including the quiet ones nobody notices at the time.

Why One Object Says More Than a Document

Studying organisational storytelling changed how I think about organisations. Stories aren't only told through words. They're told through symbols, objects, traditions, the small details people notice without being told to look for them. A federation's story lives in how it runs a tournament, not only in its bylaws. A company's story lives in the object on someone's desk that nobody asked them to keep, not only in its mission statement. One meaningful object can communicate an organisation's identity faster, and more honestly, than pages of documentation ever could, because nobody had to write it down for it to be true.

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If someone asked me to describe my organisation using only one object, I wouldn't choose a laptop. I'd choose a chess queen.

Ali Abdisalam Hussein

Because strategy, in the end, is about making thoughtful decisions that shape what becomes possible next, not about the tools sitting on the desk while those decisions get made.

Final Thought

The queen stands alone on the board not because it's isolated, but because it's trusted to cover the most ground. That's the role I keep finding myself in, across every organisation and every project: the one who has to see the whole board, move in whatever direction it takes, and make sure the position is stronger after the move than it was before.