Climatic Patterns in Wardley MappingThe Seven Basic Patterns and How to Use Them
Climatic patterns are the changes that happen to your landscape whatever you do. You can't stop them, but you can learn to anticipate them. Here are the seven basic patterns Simon Wardley describes, from how everything evolves to how success breeds inertia, and what each one means for how you choose methods, buy, and organise.
What Climatic Patterns Are
In Wardley's Strategy Cycle, climate is one of Sun Tzu's five factors, alongside purpose, landscape, doctrine, and leadership. Climatic patterns are the forces that act on every map, such as components evolving or competitors changing the game. Some let you say what will happen but not when; others let you anticipate both. The seven patterns below are the basic set. The Body of Knowledge lists the rest, grouped by category.
Everything Evolves Through Supply and Demand Competition
Wherever there is competition, components move from left to right across the map, from Genesis to Commodity. This is true of activities, practices, data, and knowledge. Evolution is not measured in time. It is measured by ubiquity (how widely something is used) and certainty (how well it is understood), which is why you can't plot it against a date. A map is a snapshot of a landscape that is always moving.
Genesis
Rare, poorly understood, and changing fast. Failure is expected, and the potential future value is high.
Custom-Built
People are building their own versions and learning quickly. A market is starting to form.
Product (+rental)
Repeatable products that compete on features. Use grows quickly, and this is usually where profits peak.
Commodity (+utility)
Standard, widely available, and expected. It competes on cost and reliability, and failure comes as a surprise.
Characteristics Change as Components Evolve
The same component behaves differently at each stage, so it has to be managed differently. Early on, it can be a source of advantage, and people tolerate it failing. Once it is a commodity, it is a cost of doing business, and people are surprised when it fails. Behaviour changes too. Photographs were once expensive, so people took few and kept them. Digital images now cost almost nothing to take, store, and throw away. This is why the need to innovate and the need to be efficient pull an organisation in opposite directions.
No Single Method Fits All
Any large system, whether a business, a government department, or an IT project, contains components at different stages of evolution. No single method, or way of buying, suits all of them, so you will need several at the same time. The same goes for people: Wardley describes three attitudes, pioneers, settlers, and town planners, each suited to a different part of the map.
Uncharted
Components on the left of the map change constantly. Agile methods suit the experimentation this needs. Fund the work as a series of small bets, the way a venture investor would, and expect some to fail.
Transitional
As components become better understood, Lean methods that cut waste and test a minimum viable product fit better. Off-the-shelf products and contracts for outcomes become sensible ways to buy.
Industrialised
Components on the right of the map need consistency at volume. Six Sigma and other methods that reduce deviation suit them, and you buy by the unit or as a utility.
Efficiency Enables Innovation
When a component becomes a commodity, it turns into a reliable building block, and that makes new things possible. Cheap, standard electricity made televisions and computers practical. Utility compute did the same for a wave of online services. Wardley sums this up as "genesis begets evolution begets genesis": the industrialisation of one component enables the genesis of new higher order systems built on top of it. Don't expect total spend to fall, though. Cheaper provision tends to release demand that was never met before, an effect known as Jevons' paradox.
Higher Order Systems Create New Sources of Value
As a component industrialises, its own margin shrinks, but what is built on top of it creates new value. It is hard to predict which of these new systems will succeed: the newer something is, the more uncertain it is, and the greater its potential future value.
Combination
Industrialised components can be combined into higher order systems that offer capabilities nobody could provide before.
New Uncharted Space
Each new higher order system opens fresh uncharted territory to explore, and the cycle starts again from Genesis.
Disruption
New systems can upset existing markets, business models, and value chains, so watch for them on your own map.
How Value Shifts Across the Domains
Each domain has a different economic profile. Knowing where a component sits tells you what kind of return to expect from it.
Uncharted
High production costs and high uncertainty, but potentially very high future opportunity.
Transitional
Uncertainty falls, production costs decline, and volumes rise. This is usually the most profitable domain, although the future opportunity is shrinking.
Industrialised
High certainty, high volumes, low production costs, and low unit margins. The component is a cost of doing business, not a differentiator.
No Choice over Evolution
Once a more efficient form of a component exists, your competitors will adopt it, and you have to follow just to keep up. This is the Red Queen effect, named after the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who tells Alice: "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Adopting utility compute won't put you ahead of rivals who have adopted it too. It stops you falling behind them. The pressure to adopt grows as more organisations make the change.
Success Breeds Inertia
The more success you have had with a component, the more you will resist it changing. Suppliers resist because their business model depends on the old form. Customers resist because of the money, skills, and practices they have invested in it. That is why the shift to a commodity is often led by new entrants with nothing to protect. When the shift comes, it is rarely gradual: the move from product to utility tends to happen quickly, a pattern Wardley describes as punctuated equilibrium. He points to Kodak and Blockbuster as companies harmed not by a lack of ideas but by inertia created by past success.
Case Study: From Compute to Cloud
Compute is Wardley's standard example of these patterns working together. Cloud is the industrialised form of compute, not something that started in the uncharted space. Utility compute then became the building block for new higher order systems, and that is where the experimentation now happens.
Genesis
In the early 1950s, machines such as LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) were one-off builds. Few existed, nobody was sure how best to use them, and owning one could be an advantage.
Custom-Built to Product
Computers became products you bought, and then racks of fairly standard servers. Practices grew up around running compute as a product, such as scaling up to bigger machines and building in spare capacity to survive failures.
Commodity (+utility)
Cloud providers now supply compute on demand and charge for what you use. For most organisations it is a cost of doing business. Suppliers built around selling servers had every reason to resist the shift.
Co-evolved Practice
As compute became a utility, new practices co-evolved with it: DevOps, designing for failure, and infrastructure as code. They replaced practices built for compute as a product. Expect inertia from teams invested in the old ways of working.
Putting Climatic Patterns to Use
Look for Movement
For each component on your map, ask how evolved it is and which way it is heading. Mark the ones you expect to move soon.
Match Methods to Stage
Check that each component is built, bought, and staffed in a way that suits its stage, rather than applying one method to everything.
Expect Inertia
Before you push a change, list who benefits from the current form, inside and outside your organisation, and how they are likely to resist.
Watch What Gets Built on Top
When a component industrialises, look at the higher order systems it makes possible. That is where future value is likely to appear, even if you can't say which ideas will succeed.
Related
Sources
- Adapted from Simon Wardley, Wardley Maps, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Material adapted from these sources is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.