Tools for way-finding in uncharted territory
I’ve continued to play around with a new workflow for animations, using mental canvas and working on visuals before even thinking about the voice-over. It feels like a more organic process, but I’m curious to hear how these “fly-throughs” are landing. In this installment I touch on Wardley Mapping and Polarity Mapping.
Here’s the transcript:
I’ve collected a few tools for navigating uncharted territory.
They run the gamut from internal tools for thought, to more active methods for mapping the territory.
Wardley mapping is a method for mapping a challenge landscape in service of strategy.
A Wardley map starts with a need to be met, a need that depends on the resources, activities and practices that we use to meet that need, all of which are themselves evolving. Connecting these things up according to their dependencies and placing the most novel ones to the left and the most stable to the right reveals a value-chain that’s useful for deciding why we should make one move rather than another, for instance to build a needed product or buy it.
What I like about Wardley mapping is that it invites me to consider what might not be making it onto the map at all, as well as the ways I am creating value that are so tacit that it doesn’t even occur to me to share them.
While Wardley Mapping is a powerful method for identifying and weighing strategic “moves”, it hides paradoxes, a hall-mark of complexity. Paradoxes make navigation difficult as they can pull us in opposite directions.
Polarity mapping is useful for revealing ways to surf strategic paradoxes, for instance the need for both stability and change, to be both efficient and exploratory, to meet both individual AND collective needs, and to address both local and global challenges.
In every situation some things are certain, some are complicated, and others are really hard to see at all.
One of the trickiest parts of wayfinding in uncharted territory is simply recognizing that we ARE in uncharted territory… Shifting between certainty and doubt requires not only that we are willing and able to suspend knowing, but that we are also sensitive to the moments when it would be useful to invite unknowing.
In an effort to make work that is freely shareable, I opt out of Medium’s paywall. If you find my animations useful, consider becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/researchArtist
