When I went through the police academy they used to teach this concept. It was centered around their OC spray curriculum, however. The idea was if you're in a fight with someone and you temporarily "blind" them with the spray, they will likely continue on their current path and try to grapple with you. In order to avoid the need for "ground tactics," as they called it, you would move to the left or the right, preferably moving your gun away from the subject, and let the suspect blow right by. Then you could use any number of techniques to take them to ground and cuff them.

They taught a similar concept in low light, particularly in searches. If you were to conduct a search in low light, you were supposed to shine the light briefly. In that time the light was on you were to search part of the area and find your next search spot. The light went off and you were to move so as to not be where the light was. (The one time I actually did have to search a large structure at night I was alone, we trained in teams of two to four, and I threw away everything taught to me and went in to the warehouse with the idea of flushing the game out the back. Whether or not I was tactically sound in that respect is open for debate. The point is moot since there was no one actually in the warehouse at the time.)

I generally think it is a good idea to not be where the fight started if at all possible. If for whatever reason your opponent loses sight of you, to reload or because something else distracted their attention, it may be valuable to be somewhere they don't expect you to be. As a general rule. One or two steps doesn't do it in my opinion, unless you're already at close quarters like in the OC spray scenario.