Making Sense of Wardley Maps
Wardley maps started popping up in my twitter feed in relation to one of my favorite thinking tools, the cynefin framework, sometime late in 2017. Eventually, my curiosity won out and I started streaming Simon Wardley’s keynotes, reading his online book, and listening to the book via his podcast to better understand Wardley maps as a tool for strategy. Here it is, over a year later and, while I find his thinking on strategy clearly articulated, and I’m completely convinced by his arguments for mapping as a non-negotiable necessity of any strategy, his mapping technique continues to puzzle me.
This post will make little sense for those unfamiliar with Wardley maps so if that’s you, might I suggest you take a detour to google up some of those Wardley keynotes and slide shares, or dig into the version of his book posted on Medium. [EDIT: I’ve made an 5 minute animation with an update on how I’m making sense of strategy] When you’re getting ready to map, I found this article particularly useful: An Introduction to Wardley Value Chain Mapping.
Wardley often notes that one of the things that makes a map useful is that it is anchored, and as such can be used to indicate movement. His maps are most often anchored using “the customer” shown at the top with vertical axis Wardley labels as “visibility”. He calls his horizontal axis “evolution” which is not too hard to understand. I sometimes think of it as stability or longevity since it’s easier for others to understand but there may be some nuance there I’m missing. [Update: Cat Swetel (in a talk you can watch here) has her own spin on the X axis: conspicuity (or perhaps conspicousness?). Novel things are quite conspicuous while highly stable and evolved things are pretty much invisible unless they break.]
My context:
While I’ve played around with a variety of contexts the one that has given me the most trouble is as a member of a committee working on peace and justice in Baltimore City. The committee has struggled to articulate the focus of their work and some in the group thought it would be helpful to come up with a strategy. Since I’d been playing around with understanding the thinking behind Wardley maps I thought this would be a good opportunity to apply them. Right out of the gate I encountered a slew of challenges in trying to apply his ideas to a non-business context: on our peace and justice committee, we have no customers (though presumably we are creating some kind of value), we have no competition (though perhaps injustice and inequity could sub in?). Fast forward to present day and I’ve put a pin in our strategy work as it doesn’t seem to make sense to craft a strategy to guide a mission we haven’t yet clearly articulated. Eventually, I will need to pony up a map though so now is a good time to wrestle with my puzzles as I continue to practice mapping. Towards that end, I begin here by articulating them.
Puzzle #1 Visibility
As noted above, Wardley labels his vertical axis “visibility” and I’d come to take that to mean visibility to the customer. Then I came across a map Wardley tweeted that I presume is meant to capture his purpose of sharing mapping as a tool. Note that the red text on the right shows the top of the vertical axis as “needs most visible to me” (meaning him), and the bottom as “needs most visible to my users”. This one is quite different from other maps and might hold some clues on how to use the tool in my peace and social justice work but I would still love to get a clearer understanding of this vertical axis.
Puzzle #2: customer
In an effort to get a better understanding of the mapping process and how it might be useful I have looked at maps from business contexts since that’s what is available. What puzzles me is how the customer is shown as a single dot! While it might make sense that an established company with a stable customer base would have a large block of customers towards the right hand side of the map (and at the top by definition?), aren’t there different kinds of customers? ones with different needs? ones that are in developing markets and so might be more toward the left?
Puzzle #3: where the heck is the change
It seems to me that one of the most powerful affordances of a mapping tool that supports strategy is in seeing how a “move” affects the business and the landscape. It baffles me that I’ve not yet come across maps that evolve over time. I’m envisioning versions of a map for a given company at intervals as both a means of learning how a “move” impacted things as well as illustrating the power and usefulness of maps in general. Maybe these exist and I just haven’t found them? [Update: as many in the twittersphere have noted, one of the big value propositions with mapping as the act of mapping and not the map. When we map together we are forming a shared language that helps us get a better handle on the complexity of work. I usually try and steer clear of universal declarations but I think it’s safe to say that all work, whether individual or group, is made up of practices, outputs, knowledge, and information spanning the breadth of Wardley’s X-axis — from inception to established to down-right calcified! All this to say that maps are less useful as artifacts to track change over time and more useful as artifacts to facilitate thinking together]
I’m putting these puzzles out there in case other mappers have insights. I’m particularly keen to hear how people have used Wardley maps for strategy in contexts that are non-competitive, for instance in pushing a legislative agenda, addressing systemic urban issues like education, poverty, and jobs creation, and in advancing the missions of non-profit/NGO orgs.
p.s. I’m thinking of attending Map-Camp in Atlanta but wondering if it’ll be too software-centric.
p.p.s Fast forward to fall 2019 and I’ve started a Patreon page to support the pro-bono work on peace & social justice. If you’d like to support this work hop on over there: https://www.patreon.com/researchArtist
