A map of physical terrain is visual, specific to the battle at hand, and includes the position of troops and obstacles relative to an anchor (magnetic North).
A map of a competitive business Landscape (a Wardley Map) is also visual and context-specific, but instead of magnetic North, the anchor is the User being served and their corresponding needs. And instead of troops, the map contains a value chain — capabilities necessary to fulfill the needs, arranged according to their dependency relationships.
The position of the capabilities on a Wardley Map is dependent on two aspects:
First, visibility to the user, which is a natural outcome of a component’s relative position within the value chain, manually adjusted as needed.
Second, evolutionary stage, as determined through evaluation of the component’s general properties and characteristics.
Making a Map
Wardley Mapping is a straight-forward process, and most difficulties boil down to concerns about making “mistakes” or doing the “wrong” thing. It is much more valuable to discard these concerns up-front, embrace the messiness of the process, and learn by boldly doing.
The process of mapping is also the process of constructing a model of reality. An incorrect model that is also useful is the definition of success.
To make a map:
- Identify the Users being served
- Identify the Needs to be met (think of these as top-level Capabilities)
- Identify the Capabilities needed to successfully meet those needs
- Determine the stage of Evolution for each Capability by evaluating its characteristics (if it’s difficult to decide, try breaking the Capability down into multiple, smaller Capabilities)
- Draw the complete value chain — User at the top, Needs and Capabilities underneath, with dependency relationships included and Capabilities placed in Stages I, II, III, or IV of Evolution
The process can also look something like this…
1. Users and Needs
2. Capabilities
3. Value Chain
4. Wardley Map
Courtesy of Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Evolution Characteristics
Everything evolves from left to right under the forces of supply and demand competition. This effect occurs in aggregate in capitalism, because as long as there is a benefit to be gotten by making something better, it’s a decent bet that someone out there will do the work to make it happen. Use the tables below to identify how evolved something is as you map. The cells of the second table can be marked by clicking on them.
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 |
Stage of Evolution |
I |
II |
III |
IV |
|
---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||
Characteristics | |||||
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.
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