Wardley Maps
About the Autho
Simon Wardley is a researcher for the Leading Edge forum, forme
Manager of Software Services at Canonical, and former CEO of
Fotango. He has written this book Creative Commons Attribution
Share-Alike 4.0 to share his experiences learning the untold lessons of
usiness strategy. The license for this book can be found at
https:
creativecommons.org/licenses
y-sa/4.0/. You can follow
Simon on Twitter @swardley.
This edition of Simon's book was compiled on December 23, 2020 fo
LearnWardleyMapping.com by Ben Mosior of Hired Thought. The
cover image is provided by Hired Thought via the Adobe Stock
Standard License.
https:
twitter.com/swardley
https:
learnwardleymapping.com
For lessons learned, upcoming classes, and more, please visit:
LearnWardleyMapping.com
ON BEING LOST
FINDING A PATH
EXPLORING THE MAP
DOCTRINE
THE PLAY AND A DECISION TO ACT
GETTING STARTED
FINDING A NEW PURPOSE
KEEPING THE WOLVES AT BAY
CHARTING THE FUTURE
I WASN’T EXPECTING THAT
A SMORGASBORD OF THE SLIGHTLY USEFUL
THE SCENARIO
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE
ON THE PRACTICE OF SCENARIO PLANNING
SUPER LOOPER
TO INFINITY AND BEYOND
BETTER FOR LESS
ON PLAYING CHESS
On being lost
Chapter 1
28 min read
This is the story of my journey, from a bumbling and confused CEO lost
in the headlights of change to having a vague idea of what I was
doing. I say vague because I’m not going to make grand claims to the
techniques that I discuss in this book. It is enough to say that I have
found them useful over the last decade whether in finding opportunity,
emoving waste, helping to organise a team of people or determining
the strategy for a company. Will they help you? That depends upon the
context that you’re operating in but since the techniques don’t take
long to learn then I’ll leave it up to the reader to discover whether they
are helpful to them or not. Remember, all models are wrong but some
are useful.
In the first part of this book, I’m going to talk about my journey in
order to introduce the techniques. In later chapters, we will switch
gear and dive into a more formal examination of the practice. One
thing I am mindful of is we rarely learn from past experience especially
when it belongs to others or when it conflicts with our perception of
how things are. However, if you are like I once was, lost at sea than
this might just help you find your path. For me this journey begins two
decades ago in the lift of the Arts hotel in Barcelona. It started when a
senior executive handed me a short document and asked “Does this
strategy makes sense?”
To be honest, I hadn’t a clue whether it did or not. I had no idea what
a real strategy was, let alone any concept of how to evaluate the
document. I leafed through the pages, it all seemed to make sense, the
diagrams looked good and I didn’t know what I was looking fo
anyway. So I responded “seems fine to me”. However, the reason why I
had chosen those words was more to do with the strategy looking
familiar than anything else. I had seen the same words used in othe
documents, some of the same diagrams in other presentations and I
had been to a conference where an industry thought leader had told
me about the stuff that mattered. That stuff — “innovation”,
“efficiency”, “alignment” and “culture” — had all been highlighted in
the strategy document.
It was the comfort of familiar words and images that had given me the
confidence to proclaim it was fine. My internal logic was a sort of herd
mentality, a “backward causality” that since it had been right there
then it must be right here. I was also young and had convinced myself
that the senior executive was bound to know the answer and they
were only asking me to test my abilities. I didn’t want to show my
inexperience. This moment however continued to i
itate me over the
years because I knew I had been false and I was just covering up my
tracks, hiding from my own inability.
A decade later, I had risen through the ranks to become the CEO of
another company. I was that most senior of executives. The company
would live or die by the strategic choices I made, or so I thought. I
wrote the strategy or at least variations were presented to me and I
would decide. But, something had gone te
ibly wrong in my journey.
Somehow along the path to becoming a CEO, I had missed those all
important lessons that told me how to evaluate a strategy. I still had no
means to understand what a good strategy was and it was no longe
enough for me to think it “seems fine”. I needed more than that as I
was the experienced executive that the less experienced took guidance
from.
I asked one of my juniors what they thought of our strategy. They
esponded “seems fine to me”. My heart sank. Unlike that confident
executive in the lift of the Arts hotel who was testing some junior, I still
hadn’t a clue. I was an imposter CEO! I needed to learn fast before
anyone found out. But how?
In 2004, I sat down in my boardroom with our strategy documents and
started to dissect them. There were lots of familiar and comfortable
terms. We had to be innovative, efficient, customer centric, web 2.0
and all that this entailed. Alas, I suspected these common “memes”
were repeated in the strategy documents of other companies because I
was pretty sure I had copied them. I had heard the thought leaders at
various conferences and read analyst reports that proclaimed these
same lines over and over as the new truth. Well, at least we were
following the herd I thought. However, someone must have started
these memes and how did they know if these memes were right? How
did I become like that confident executive that I remember?
Frustrated with my own natural inability, I started to trawl through
ooks on strategy. I was looking for some way of understanding, a
framework or a reference point to compare against. More
utally, I
was lost at sea and looking for something to grab hold off, an executive
lifeboat. I found little that gave me comfort and after talking with my
peers, I became convinced that our strategy was almost identical to
competitors in our industry. I was beginning to feel as though the
entire field of strategy was either a cosmic joke played by management
consultants or that there was some secret tome everyone was hiding
from me. I was getting a bit desperate, despondent even. Someone
would rumble that I was faking it.
I started using 2x2s, SWOTS, Porter’s forces and all manner of
instruments. Everything felt lacking, nothing satisfied. I knew the
company to the outside world was doing well but internally we had
communication issues and frustration over direction and organisation.
To improve matters, I had a
anged for one of those management
courses which
ing the entire team together. I had been seduced by a
simple idea that with better communication then a strategy would
ecome clear, as if by magic. We just needed to talk more.
I rapidly discovered that despite all of our talking, daily status
meetings and our weekly Town hall that beyond the very senio
management, no-one really understood our strategy. I also doubted
whether the senior management did. I certainly was unsure of it. I
turned inward, the problem was me! There would come a reckoning
when everyone would realise that behind the success, the profits, the
old pronouncements and confident exterior lurked a mass of doubt.
They would rumble that I was making it up. I shouldn’t be the CEO. At
that point in time, in mid 2004, I was drowning in uncertainty and an
easy mark for any would be consultant peddling snake oil. I would
have gladly bought it. An entire crate of the stuff.
Serendipity
By chance, I had picked up a copy of the “Art of War” by Sun Tzu.
Truth be told I picked up several different translations as the bookselle
had advised that none of them were quite the same. That was
serendipity and I owe that bookseller a debt of thanks because it was
whilst reading through my second translation that I noticed something
that I had been missing in my understanding of strategy. Sun Tzu had
described five factors that matter in competition between two
opponents. Loosely speaking, these are: — purpose, landscape,
climate, doctrine and leadership. I’ve drawn them as a circle in figure
1.
Figure 1 — The five factors
When I looked at my strategy document, I could see a purpose and
then a huge jump into leadership and the strategic choices we had
made. But where was landscape, climate and doctrine? I started to
think back to every business book that I had read. Everything seemed
to do this jump from purpose to leadership.
For reference, Sun Tzu’s five factors are: -
Purpose is your moral imperative, it is the scope of what you are
doing and why you are doing it. It is the reason why others follow you.
Landscape is a description of the environment that you’re competing
in. It includes the position of troops, the features of the landscape and
any obstacles in your way.
Climate describes the forces that act upon the environment. It is the
patterns of the seasons and the rules of the game. These impact the
landscape and you don’t get to choose them but you can discove
them. It includes your competitors actions.
Doctrine is the training of your forces, the standard ways of operating
and the techniques that you almost always apply. These are the
universal principles, the set of beliefs that appear to work regardless of
the landscape that is faced.
Leadership is about the strategy that you choose considering you
purpose, the landscape, the climate and your capabilities. It is to “the
attle at hand”. It is context specific i.e. these techniques are known to
depend upon the landscape and your purpose.
I started to consider strategy in terms of these five factors. I
understood our purpose, or at least I thought I did, but what about
landscape? Normally in military conflicts or even in games like chess
we have some means of visualising the landscape through a map,
whether it’s the more geographical kind that we are familiar with or an
image of the board. These maps are not only visual but context specific
i.e. to the game or battle at hand. A map allows me to see the position
of pieces and where they can move to.
This last point struck a chord with me. When playing a game of chess
there was usually multiple moves that I could make and