Maguire has provided a kind of grid which suggests the quality, quantity and foolishness of different exploration strategies. For example, how constrained or coupled is the environment (an organizational analogue to the N/K Model). He can use this grid to classify the appropriateness of a particular business strategy, e.g., Mintzberg's (1988) strategy of quality differentiation is a relatively local search on a short distance while design differentiation strategy is a farther away search in the adaptation landscape. Furthermore, Maguire has identified exploration or search parameters: exploration rate (search activity per unit time, number of sample units per unit time); exploration distance (search distance across landscape); and exploration direction (which variables on a string to flip; or, constraining the search to a specific direction).

In the new nonlinear and complex geography of organizations, therefore, leaders as planners face a two-fold challenge: drawing useful maps of the new terrain and exploring this new terrain through the encouragement of strategies that tend toward higher fit. However, designing strategies with better fit does not always consist of climbing straight-up adaptive hills. Sometimes random searches are what's called-for, sometimes what is required is the seemingly foolish move of going down a hill, and there are still other seemingly counterproductive practices. Thus, in the nonlinear geography of complex systems, the planner also needs a bag of unusual tricks, so now we turn to the role of planner as Trickster.