Reading :: Wardley Maps

Wardley Maps By Simon Wardley

First of all, thanks for Frederik Matheson for introducing me to Wardley’s work. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces, but finally was able to devote some time to read this linked PDF -- which is not a published book, but rather a compilation of Wardley’s Medium posts under a CC license. Still, it hangs together decently well as a book.

Wardley describes an issue he ran into years ago while serving as a CEO in the tech space: he had no way to envision strategy. He assumed that other CEOs did and that he just had to figure out how they were doing it. Eventually it dawned on him that they were as lost as he was. Like him, others leapt directly from purpose to leadership. Reading Sun Tzu, he realized that other factors had to be taken into account: landscape, climate, and doctrine. And he had no way of accounting for these.

This realization began a spate of eclectic reading as well as analogizing from other domains. Wardley drew from his experience playing games (chess, World of Warcraft), from warfare (especially map making, but also OODA), from Simon’s theory of hierarchy, from business and management sources (the Red Queen’s race, Boisot’s I-space, Moore’s Crossing the Chasm), and other sources in order to develop visualizations that could help him better understand strategy and make strategic decisions in the technology space. 

The resulting system is eclectic and complex -- and I mean that as a compliment. Wardley emphasizes (here and on his Twitter feed) that it’s more of a direction than a guaranteed product -- a way to map strategy that we can experiment with and improve. By folding in insights from different domains, Wardley builds in different perspectives and pushes us to think through strategy in ways that go beyond storytelling. 

How reliable are these maps, and do they serve to provide certainty or to generate potential relationships to explore in other ways? Gee, I don’t know. To me, they seem like they provide a visual vocabulary for identifying and categorizing potential change rather than a precision predictive tool. But (full disclosure) I skipped the exercises, which largely focused on business strategy for established companies. Still, I can see Wardley Maps as a heuristic that does for business strategy what the Business Model Canvas does for identifying core business components -- that is, it gives you the rules of the game, helps you to apply and understand things you already know, and identifies things you need to either discover or invent. 

I’m not a member of that target audience, since I’m not running a company, but I can see how the principles can apply to individual work and academic units. And this brings me to what I think is the broader lesson. When you feel lost or confused about what you’re trying to do, one way to address it is to change how you’re representing your work to yourself. That’s why we use calendars and to-do lists, Kanban boards and SWOT, flowcharts and business model canvases (and in qualitative research: flow, network, and matrix models). Wardley Maps zoom out beyond the scope of all of these, representing broader strategic issues in a way that emphasizes specific principles and considerations, and providing a way to explore new connections and relationships before you have to experience them. Reading this book didn’t make me want to draw Wardley Maps, per se, but it made me want to lift some of these techniques to address the ways in which I have been feeling overwhelmed in my own work. If you’re similarly struggling to pull back and see “the big picture,” definitely give this book a read.