GuidesWardley Mapping Knowledge Base

The Strategy Cycle

Purpose, Landscape, Climate, Doctrine, and Leadership

How Simon Wardley's strategy cycle works: purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, and leadership, how it builds on John Boyd's OODA loop, and how to use it.

The Origins and Features of Wardley Mapping

How Simon Wardley created Wardley Mapping at Fotango in 2005, and the core parts of a map: the value chain, evolution, climate, doctrine, gameplay, and flows.

Understanding John Boyd's OODA Loop

How John Boyd's OODA loop works, why orientation sits at its centre, where the idea came from, and how it fits into Simon Wardley's Strategy Cycle for mapping.

Wardley Mapping Doctrine

Selected Principles by Phase

Simon Wardley's doctrine: principles that apply in any context, set out by phase and category, from knowing your users to designing for constant evolution.

Climatic Patterns in Wardley Mapping

The Seven Basic Patterns and How to Use Them

The seven basic climatic patterns in Wardley Mapping, from everything evolves to success breeds inertia, with a compute-to-cloud case study and how to use them.

Competition in Wardley Mapping

Conflict, Collaboration, and Co-operation

Conflict, collaboration, and co-operation in Wardley Mapping: what each form of competition is, where it tends to apply on a map, and which plays relate to it.

User Needs in Wardley Mapping

Finding the Needs That Anchor Your Map

Why user needs anchor every Wardley Map: how to identify your users, find their real needs, allow for bias as components evolve, and trace the flow of capital.

Wardley Maps as a Common Language

How Shared Maps Help Teams Collaborate

Why the doctrine "Use a common language" means Wardley Maps: an anchor, position, and movement let finance, IT, and operations challenge one shared picture.

Gameplay in Wardley Mapping

An Introduction to Context-Specific Play

An introduction to gameplay in Wardley Mapping: open approaches, IPR, FUD, toxic components, ecosystem plays, and how to choose a play that fits your map.

Managing Inertia in Wardley Mapping

Wardley's 16 forms of inertia in four groups, each with a counter, plus how to spot inertia on a map, work with resistance, and match methods to evolution.

Managing Inertia in AI Adoption

An AI example for each of Wardley's 16 forms of inertia, from vendor lock-in to declining unit value, with the counter to prepare before the objection comes.

The Anti-Pattern Organisation

What an organisation looks like when it ignores Simon Wardley's doctrine, from failing to focus on user needs to misunderstanding its landscape and strategy.

The Lippitt-Knoster Model for Managing Complex Change

The Knoster model for managing complex change: the five things a change needs (vision, skills, incentives, resources, an action plan), the matrix, and what each gap causes.

ILC: Innovate, Leverage, Commoditise

Using Your Ecosystem as a Sensing Engine

How the ILC model works: provide a utility, let others innovate on it, use consumption data to spot what is spreading, then commoditise it into a new utility.

Thinking Small

Small Teams, Small Contracts, and Attention to Detail

Apply Wardley's two "think small" doctrine principles: map your landscape, put a small contract around each component, and give each contract a small team.

Transparency in Strategy

How to apply the "Be transparent" doctrine principle: share your Wardley Maps, invite challenge to your assumptions, and handle the discomfort it brings.

Learn Wardley Mapping

Custom GPTs That Run in ChatGPT

Six custom GPTs that help you learn and practise Wardley Mapping in ChatGPT: ask about the book, find relevant talks, take a course, or get feedback on a map.