Fitness is all about readiness and training — recognizing that transformation is not an overnight event… but instead the progressive accumulation of small changes to habits[1].

Most organizations, including your own, are very likely operating without the degree of situational awareness that the strategic aspects of Wardley Mapping assumes. And that’s okay! But before we run a marathon, we have to learn how to stretch and exercise.

Here are a few to start with:

1. Develop a common language (make maps, decide what parts are in the system, what to name them, etc.).
2. Know your users (who are served by the system) and focus on their needs (meet your needs by meeting theirs).
3. Remove bias (don’t build what can be bought) and remove duplication (many implementations of the same thing).

There are many more principles to learn. Start with a few, get good at them, and then add more.

Defense focuses on adopting a posture that enables your organization to flow with change instead of resisting it stubbornly. To do so, we must learn to anticipate what change is possible and where it might happen. Simon Wardley has identified many different patterns of capitalism to help in this respect.

Here are a few patterns to start with:

1. Everything evolves through supply and demand competition, and characteristics change as a result (see: evolution).
2. Efficiency enables innovation (highly evolved components form building blocks for new sources of value to emerge).
3. Success breeds inertia (resistance to change), which can eventually threaten an organization’s continued existence.

There are many more patterns here. Again, start with a few, learn how they work, and then add more.

Offense is about conditions and consequences[2] — actively shaping the environment over time to enable favorable futures. It’s important to integrate these strategic patterns with your understanding of fitness (doctrinal principles) and defensive capabilities (climate patterns).

A few useful patterns to know first:

1. Open approaches (open source, data, practice) accelerates the evolution of a component.
2. Assertion of Intellectual Property Rights, however, does the opposite (slows evolution down).
3. Innovate-Leverage-Commoditize is a pattern of industrializing a component, allowing others to build on top of it, and then monitoring usage data to identify future candidates for industrailiziation.

Again, there are many more patterns to explore. Wardley Mapping is an iterative journey of learning through action that can take decades to understand fully. Thankfully, it doesn’t much time at all to learn enough to be dangerous.