Management with Maps

From Wardley Maps by Simon Wardley

The Strategic Cycle

He picked up a copy of the “Art of War” by Sun Tzu. It says there are five factors that matter in competition between two opponents. Loosely speaking, these are: — purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine and leadership.

Purpose is your moral imperative, it is the scope of what you are doing and why you are doing it. It is the reason why others follow you.

Landscape is a description of the environment that you’re competing in. It includes the position of troops, the features of the landscape and any obstacles in your way.

Climate describes the forces that act upon the environment. It is the patterns of the seasons and the rules of the game. These impact the landscape and you don’t get to choose them but you can discover them. It includes your competitors actions.

Doctrine is the training of your forces, the standard ways of operating and the techniques that you almost always apply. These are the universal principles, the set of beliefs that appear to work regardless of the landscape that is faced.

Leadership is about the strategy that you choose considering your purpose, the landscape, the climate and your capabilities. It is to “the battle at hand”. It is context specific i.e. these techniques are known to depend upon the landscape and your purpose.

For air combat, John Boyd developed the OODA loop. This is a cycle of observe the environment, orient around it, decide and then act.

Together this gives the Strategic Cycle:

Finding a Path

The map has an anchor which is the user and their needs. The position of components in the map on the y-axis are shown relative to that user on a value chain, represented by the y-axis. Each component needs the component below it, however the higher up the map a component is then the more visible it becomes to the user.

The components of the map also have a stage of evolution, found on the x-axis:

Genesis This represents the unique, the very rare, the uncertain, the constantly changing and the newly discovered. Our focus is on exploration.

Custom built This represents the very uncommon and that which we are still learning about. It is individually made and tailored for a specific environment. It is bespoke. It frequently changes. It is an artisan skill. You wouldn’t expect to see two of these that are the same. Our focus is on learning and our craft.

Product (including rental) This represent the increasingly common, the manufactured through a repeatable process, the more defined, the better understood. Change becomes slower here. Whilst there exists differentiation particularly in the early stages there is increasing stability and sameness. You will often see many of the same product. Our focus is on refining and improving.

Commodity (including utility) This represents scale and volume operations of production, the highly standardised, the defined, the fixed, the undifferentiated, the fit for a specific known purpose and repetition, repetition and more repetition. Our focus is on ruthless removal of deviation, on industrialisation, and operational efficiency. With time we become habituated to the act, it is increasingly less visible and we often forget it’s even there.

Climatic Pattern : Peace, War and Wonder

We first start with the appearance of this novel thing, its genesis. The component is highly uncertain, of potential future value and risky. We don’t know who will introduce it, whether it will go anywhere or what it will transform into. But, it’s a potential source of Wonder. If it does find a use then supply and demand competition will start to cause its evolution.

The nature of competition will now shift to suppliers of products with constant feature improvement. It’s no longer about exploration of the uncharted space but about defining, refining and learning about the act.

Peace

It’s about settling the space.

It is a time of high margin

But the success leads to inertia to change

The successful activity has now become ubiquitous and “well understood”. It is now suitable for more commodity or utility provision

This more commodity forms (especially utility services) are often dismissed by existing customers and suppliers of products who have their own inertia to change

Many past giants now face disruption and failure. Unable to invest, they often seek to reduce costs in order to return profitability to the former levels they experienced in the peace stage of competition. Their decline accelerates. This stage of competition is where disruptive change exceeds sustaining, it has become a fight for survival and it is a time of War with many corporate casualties. This period of rapid change is know as a punctuated equilibrium.