Wardley Mapping

Wardley mapping is a visual method for exploring, understanding, and communicating strategy under circumstances of constant change.

What is your competitive environment?
Where should you focus? (Why here over there?)
What should you own and build in-house? What should you buy off-the-shelf or outsource?
Which methodologies should you use?
Where are your competitors relative to you?
What market changes can you anticipate?
How can you organize to accommodate continuous change?
Which context-specific strategic plays are currently possible?

What is a Wardley Map

A Wardley Map decomposes a product along the Value Chain (some prefer the term supply chain) to get deeper insights into the structure and the forces shaping the evolution of the market and the necessary decisions.

The vertical axis concerns with dependencies, the horizontal axis positions the elements along their evolutionary state, aka maturity.

The analysis cycle

While the map is a useful and actionable visualization of the situation, Wardley Mapping gets really useful by applying it the analysis cycle. The cycle uses the vocabulary of Sun Tsu (Wardley points out that it is about the same as John Boyd’s OODA loop.

A typical analysis goes along the cycle above.

Purpose

Your moral imperative. The scope of what you are doing and why you are doing it. The reason others follow you.

Strategy is all about observing the landscape, understanding how it is changing and using what resources you have to maximise your chances of success. Obviously, you need to define what success is and that’s where your purpose comes in. It’s the yardstick by which you currently measure yourself. However, as this is a cycle, your very actions may also change your purpose and so don’t get to stuck on it.Simon Wardley in
On Playing Chess

Climate

The climate may affect your purpose, the environment may affect your strategy and your actions may affect all… Your purpose isn’t fixed, it changes as your landscape changes and as you act. There is no “core”, it’s all transitional.Simon Wardley in

On Being Lost

Landscape

A description of your competitive environment, including its features, your position, and any obstacles in the way.

To map your landscape:

Know your users (who you serve)
Know their needs
Know the prerequisite activities to meet those needs
Add position (connect users, needs, and prerequisites from top to bottom according to dependence)
Add movement (place needs and prerequisites left to right according to evolutionary stage)

Determining Movement

The movement of a component along the X axis is determined by its stage of evolution.

Stage of Evolution	I	II	III	IV
Activities	Genesis	Custom	Product (+rental)	Commodity (+utility)
Practices	Novel	Emerging	Good	Best
Data	Unmodelled	Divergent	Convergent	Modelled
Knowledge	Concept	Hypothesis	Theory	Accepted

Don’t worry if some of the terms are confusing… just use what you can. Like Chess, mapping is a craft and you will get better with practice.Simon Wardley in
Finding a Path

Evolutionary Characteristics Cheat Sheet

An interactive list of characteristics to help you determine how evolved something is (select cells to highlight).

Stage of Evolution Characteristics	I	II	III	IV
Ubiquity	Rare	Slowly increasing consumption	Rapidly increasing consumption	Widespread and stabilising
Certainty	Poorly understood	Rapid increases in learning	Rapid increases in use / fit for purpose	Commonly understood (in terms of use)
Publication Types	Normally describe the wonder of the thing	Build / construct / awareness and learning	Maintenance / operations / installation / features	Focused on use
General Properties
Market	Undefined market	Forming market	Growing market	Mature market
Knowledge management	Uncertain	Learning on use	Learning on operation	Known / accepted
Market perception	Chaotic (non-linear)	Domain of experts	Increasing expectations of use	Ordered (appearance of being linear) / trivial
User perception	Different / confusing / exciting / surprising	Leading edge / emerging	Common / disappointed if not used or available	Standard / expected
Perception in industry	Competitive advantage / unpredictable / unknown	Competitive advantage / ROI / case examples	Advantage through implementation / features	Cost of doing business / accepted
Focus of value	High future worth	Seeking profit / ROI?	High profitability	High volume / reducing margin
Understanding	Poorly understood / unpredictable	Increasing understanding / development of measures	Increasing education / constant refinement of needs / measures	Believed to be well defined / stable / measurable
Comparison	Constantly changing / a differential / unstable	Learning from others / testing the water / some evidential support	Feature difference	Essential / operational advantage
Failure	High / tolerated / assumed	Moderate / unsurprising but disappointed	Not tolerated, focus on constant improvement	Operational efficiency and surprised by failure
Market action	Gambling / driven by gut	Exploring a “found” value	Market analysis / listening to customers	Metric driven / build what is needed
Efficiency	Reducing the cost of change (experimentation)	Reducing cost of waste (Learning)	Reducing cost of waste (Learning)	Reducing cost of deviation (Volume)
Decision drivers	Heritage / culture	Analysis & synthesis	Analysis & synthesis	Previous experience

Based on Simon Wardley‘s Evolutionary Characteristics Cheat Sheet, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Climate

The forces acting upon the environment. The rules of the game, patterns of the seasons, and competitor actions.


Competitors	Competitors actions will change the game	Most competitors have poor situational awareness
Components	Everything evolves through supply and demand competition	Evolution consists of multiple waves of diffusion with many chasms	No choice over evolution	Commoditisation does not equal Centralisation
Characteristics change as components evolve	No single method fits all	Components can co-evolve
Financial	Higher order systems create new sources of value	Future value is inversely proportional to the certainty we have over it.	Efficiency does not mean a reduced spend	Evolution to higher order systems results in increasing energy consumption
Capital flows to new areas of value	Creative Destruction
Inertia	Success breeds inertia	Inertia increases the more successful the past model is	Inertia can kill an organisation
Prediction	You cannot measure evolution over time or adoption	The less evolved something is then the more uncertain it is	Not everything is random	Economy has cycles
Two different forms of disruption	A “war” (point of industrialisation) causes organisations to evolve
Speed	Efficiency enables innovation	Evolution of communication can increase the speed of evolution overall	Change is not always linear	Shifts from product to utility tend to demonstrate a punctuated equilibrium

Based on Simon Wardley‘s, Climatic Patterns, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Your First Patterns

Pattern 1: Everything evolves from left to right under the influence of supply and demand competition.

Genesis	Custom	Product (and rental)	Commodity (and utility)
Unique, rare, uncertain, constantly changing, newly-discovered.	Uncommon, frequently-changing, requires artisanal skill, no two are the same.	Increasingly common, more defined, better understood. Repeatable processes. Change is slower. Initial differentiation but increasing stability and sameness. There are often many of the same kind of product.	Scale and volume operations of production. Highly standardized. Defined. Fixed. Undifferentiated. Fit for a specific known purpose. Repetition, repetition, repetition… With time, it becomes commonplace and less visible.
The focus is on exploring.	The focus is on learningand developing the craft	The focus is on refining and improving.	The focus is on ruthlessly removing deviation, industrialising, and increasing operational efficiency.

Pattern 2: As components evolve, their characteristics change.

Uncharted	Industrialised
Chaotic	Ordered
Uncertain	Known
Unpredictable	Measured
Changing	Stable
Different	Standard
Exciting	Obvious
Future Worth	Low Margin
Unusual	Essential
Rare	Ubiquitous
Poorly Understood	Defined
Experimentation	Volume Operations
Differential	Operational Efficiency
Competitive Advantage	Cost of Doing Business

Doctrine (Self-Assessment)

The training of your people, the standard ways of operating, and the techniques that you almost always apply. Select cells multiple times to progress through colors indicating a weak, warning, good, and neutral (undetermined) status.

Phase 1: Stop Self Harm

Communication	Use a common language (necessary for collaboration)	Challenge assumptions (speak up and question)	Focus on high situational awareness (understand what is being considered)
Development	Know your users (e.g. customers, shareholders, regulators, staff)	Focus on user needs	Remove bias and duplication	Use appropriate methods (e.g. agile vs lean vs six sigma)
Learning	Use a systematic mechanism of learning (a bias towards data)
Operations	Think small (as in know the details)

Phase 2: Becoming More Context Aware

Communication	Be transparent (a bias towards open)
Development	Focus on the outcome not a contract (e.g. worth based development)	Be pragmatic (it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice)	Use appropriate tools (e.g. mapping, financial models)	Think fast, inexpensive, restrained, and elegant (FIRE, formerly FIST)
Use standards where appropriate
Leading	Move fast (an imperfect plan executed today is better than a perfect plan executed tomorrow)	Strategy is iterative not linear (fast reactive cycles)
Learning	A bias towards action (learn by playing the game)
Operations	Manage failure	Manage inertia (e.g. existing practices, political capital, previous investment)	Effectiveness over efficiency
Structure	Think aptitude and attitude	Think small (as in teams, “two pizza”)	Distribute power and decision making

Phase 3: Better for Less

Leading	Be the owner (take responsibility)	Think big (inspire others, provide direction)	Strategy is complex (there will be uncertainty)	Commit to the direction, be adaptive along the path (crossing the river by feeling the stones)
Be humble (listen, be selfless, have fortitude)
Learning	A bias towards the new (be curious, take appropriate risks)
Operations	Optimise flow (remove bottlenecks)	Do better with less (continual improvement)	Set exceptional standards (great is just not good enough)
Structure	Seek the best	Provide purpose, mastery, & autonomy

Phase 4: Continuously Evolving

Leading	Exploit the landscape	There is no core (everything is transient)
Learning	Listen to your ecosystems (acts as future sensing engines)
Structure	Design for constant evolution	There is no one culture (e.g. pioneers, settlers and town planners)

Adapted by Tasshin Fogleman from this tweetstorm and Better for Less, courtesy of Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Additional Instructions

By examining the doctrine in an organization, you can get an idea of how adaptable it is and how well it will respond to external change or gameplay. You can do this with your own organization, or with other organizations.

In-person? Gather several people from different levels of the organization and perform the above self-assessment together. (There may be arguments, but that’s not a bad thing.) Distributed? See this form-based assessment by Justin Stach.

Once you’ve assessed the status quo of doctrine in your organization, you can go about addressing areas of weakness. Simon suggests you do this in phases. The above self-assessment’s phases presents his best guess at the order in which you should tackle them.

Leadership (Gameplay)

The context-specific strategy you choose after considering your purpose, the landscape, the climate, and your capabilities.

Options by evolution	I	II	III	IV
Accelerators	Open approaches	Co-operation	Exploiting network effects	Industrial policy
Market enablement
De-accelerators	Exploiting constraint	IPR	Creating constraints
Dealing with toxicity	Pig in a poke	Sweat and Dump	Disposal of liability	Refactoring
Ecosystem	Sensing Engines (ILC)	Two factor markets	Alliances	Channel conflicts & disintermediation
Co-creation	Co-opting and intercession	Embrace and extend	Tower and moat
User Perception	Fear, uncertainty and doubt	Artificial competition	Brand and marketing	Bundling
Confusion of choice	Creating artificial needs	Education	Lobbying / counterplay
Attacking	Centre of gravity	Directed investment	Experimentation	Fool’s mate
Playing both sides	Press release process	Undermining barriers to entry
Competitor	Ambush	Circling and probing	Fragmentation play	Misdirection
Reinforcing competitor inertia	Restriction of movement	Sapping	Talent raid
Defensive	Defensive regulation	Limitation of competition	Managing inertia	Procrastination
Raising barriers to entry	Threat acquisition
Markets	Buyer / supplier power	Differentiation	Harvesting	Last man standing
Pricing policy	Signal distortion	Standards game	Trading
Poison	Designed to fail	Insertion	Licensing play
Positional	Fast follower	First mover	Land grab	Weak signal / horizon

Based on Simon Wardley‘s, On 61 Different Forms of Gameplay, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Glossary

Name	Description
Context	Our purpose and the landscape
Environment	The context and how it is changing
Situational awareness	Our level of understanding of the environment
Actual	The map in use
Domain	Uncharted vs Transitional vs Industrialised
Stage	Of evolution e.g. Genesis, Custom, Product, Commodity
Type	Activity, Practice, Data or Knowledge
Component	A single entity in a map
Anchor	The user need
Position	Position of a component relative to the anchor in a chain of needs
Need	Something a higher level system requires
Capability	High level needs you provide to others
Movement	How evolved a component is
Interface	Connection between components
Flow	Transfer of money, risk & information between components
Climate	Rules of the game, patterns that are applied across contexts
Doctrine	Approaches which can be applied regardless of context
Strategy	A context specific approach