GlossaryWardley Mapping Body of Knowledge
A glossary of 74 key terms and concepts drawn from the Wardley Mapping Body of Knowledge.
A
Actual
The map in use.
Anchor
The user need — the starting point of a value chain, representing the user and their needs.
B
Bias
Living inside an echo chamber and failing to recognise that a situation has changed and once-perfect solutions were replaced by something more efficient.
C
Capability
High-level needs you provide to others.
Capital
Anything that you control and can make work for you. The obvious case is money, as you can acquire goods and services. Less obvious examples include reputation, social skills, and relationships with customers and partners.
Capital Flow
The movement of investment and value between components on a map. When industrialisation of a component happens, investors shift resources toward new, more efficient versions, inflating the value of new businesses and deflating the value of old ones.
Centralisation
A trend when one company wins the market and acquires or starves the competition in a particular niche. It usually means a concentration of assets and power.
Cheat Sheet
A table with secondary characteristics allowing for determining the level of evolution of a given component.
Climate
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, supply and demand forces, inertia, and co-evolution of practice.
Commodification
A process which happens when something not previously associated with business or money gets commercial value, changing its nature. Example: Agile manifesto vs Scrum certificates.
Commoditisation
A process during which existing products become very similar to each other (there is no point in adding new features), and brands become irrelevant. Very close in meaning to industrialisation.
Commodity (+utility)
A stage of evolution in which the brand has almost no value and all providers have very similar offerings. The component can be easily acquired and sold. It represents scale and volume operations of production, the highly standardised, the defined, the undifferentiated, and the fit for a specific known purpose.
Component
A single entity in a map — a part of a bigger whole. A fragment of the surrounding reality that we decide (arbitrarily) to treat as a single unit for the purpose of further analysis.
Componentisation
The process (and assumption) that every activity formed in the Genesis phase as a blob will sooner or later be split into components, and those components will start evolving separately, opening the possibility of being used in other contexts.
Context
Our purpose, the landscape, climate, and our mission.
Creative Destruction
A term popularised by the economist Joseph Schumpeter for a process in which an invention drastically changes the value chain. The combination of inertia, punctuated equilibrium, the Red Queen effect and co-evolution of practice means that shifts across boundaries tend to produce rapid destruction of the past along with creation of the new.
Custom-Built
The very uncommon, that which we are still learning about. It is individually made and tailored for a specific environment. It is bespoke, frequently changes, and is an artisan skill. You wouldn't expect to see two that are the same.
D
Decentralisation
A trend reverse to centralisation. Power, once centralised, is difficult to decentralise, and companies that gain control over an ecosystem are very difficult to eradicate.
Doctrine
Universal principles and standard ways of operating that appear to work regardless of the landscape. These are the set of best practices necessary for any organisation to build and execute strategy, focusing on avoiding unforced errors.
Domain
A zone in the evolution of components. Each map has three domains: the uncharted space where you have to explore and take gambles, the industrialised space where more certainty rules, and the in-between transitional space. Each domain has different patterns of economic competition.
Duplication
Learning, acting or constructing something many times across the organisation without considering the cost of committing the same errors again and again. Usually a good way of wasting resources.
E
Environment
The context and how it is changing.
Evolution
A pattern of change that all components undergo due to supply and demand competition, represented on a map as four stages. It is measured through ubiquity (how widely used) and certainty (how complete and well-understood). Evolution is a subjective metric, as it is not time-bound.
F
Flow
Transfer of capital (e.g. risk, financial, physical, social, information) between components on a map.
G
Gameplay
The actions you can take to create the most advantageous situation. It involves weighing risks and profits, manipulating the landscape, and maximising the overall well-being of your organisation through context-specific patterns.
Genesis
The first stage of evolution characterised by a non-existing market, high uncertainty, and high future potential. This represents the unique, the very rare, the uncertain, and the newly discovered. The focus is on exploration.
I
Industrialisation
A process in which a component changes characteristics and transitions from the Product evolution phase to the Commodity/Utility one. Increased efficiency unlocks a long tail of unmet needs, often later referred to as a "revolution".
Industrialised
A domain associated with high certainty, high levels of predictability, high volumes, low production costs and low unit margin. The activity is seen as an expected norm — it has become commonplace.
Inertia
Resistance to change. People want to protect what they have and will find real and imaginary problems to justify not changing. Inertia has multiple categories including disruption of past norms, transition to the new, agency of the new, and business model.
Innovation
The first attempt to carry out an idea into practice (Professor Jan Fagerberg's definition).
Innovation Paradox
While innovation is a spontaneous act, favourable conditions for it can be created by adopting certain discipline. However, if the discipline is too strict, innovation will plummet.
Interface
The connection between two components, where one meets the need of another. On a map, interfaces are the lines between components.
J
Jevons' Paradox
When increased efficiency counter-intuitively boosts resource consumption instead of decreasing its usage. It is likely to occur during industrialisation of a component. Example: more efficient steam engines consumed more coal because they were applied in more use cases.
L
Landscape
A description of the environment you are competing in. It includes the position of troops, the features of the landscape and any obstacles in your way — what user needs are being satisfied and in what way.
Leadership
The context-specific part of the strategy cycle: the choices you make about where to act and why, given your purpose, the landscape, the climate, and your doctrine. Gameplay is part of leadership.
Limits
All maps are imperfect, all models are wrong. Maps are a means of communication, learning, collaborating, removing bias and creating common understanding. They cannot tell you what to do.
M
Map
A visual representation of a landscape that includes context, position, an anchor, movement, and components.
Marketplace
The environment in which components are exchanged and competition occurs, evolving from undefined through forming and growing to mature.
Movement
How components change position on a map. Supply and demand competition moves components from left to right along the evolution axis, from Genesis towards Commodity (+utility). Showing likely movement is one of the things that makes a diagram a map.
N
Need
Something a higher-level system requires.
O
OODA Loop
A decision-making framework developed by military strategist John Boyd. Stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It's a core part of the Wardley Strategy Cycle.
P
Partial Order
A mathematical term describing a particular form of relationship between nodes. Wardley Maps show partially ordered components.
Pioneers
People who explore never-before-discovered concepts in uncharted land. They create "crazy" ideas and make future success possible. Their type of innovation is core research. They fail a lot, but what they build enables everything that follows.
Position
The position of a component relative to the anchor (user) in a chain of needs. Higher components are more visible to the user; lower components are less visible.
Practice
A special type of component which defines how to do things. Also, the only way to get fluent with maps, as mapping is a tacit skill.
Product (+rental)
A stage of evolution representing the increasingly common, the manufactured through a repeatable process, the more defined, the better understood. Change becomes slower. Whilst there exists differentiation in the early stages, there is increasing stability and sameness.
Productisation
A process during which a custom-built solution is packaged and appears as a product on the market.
Publication Types
The tone of publications changes as the evolution of a given component changes — from wonder and discovery in Genesis, through build and awareness in Custom-Built, to maintenance and operations in Product, to focused on use in Commodity.
Purpose
Your moral imperative — the scope of what you are doing and why you are doing it. It is the reason why others follow you.
R
Red Queen Effect
If all competitors are trying to get more efficient, those who do not will fall behind. You have to continuously strive to improve things you are good at, even if it leads to creative destruction.
S
Scenarios
A set of actions helping you to influence your environment and other actors through strategic planning.
Servitization
Developing capabilities to provide services and solutions that supplement traditional product offerings. Essentially: identifying what consumers mainly use a product for and offering that directly with all dependencies.
Settlers
People who can turn a half-baked thing into something useful for a larger audience. They build trust and understanding, turn prototypes into products, make them manufacturable, listen to customers and turn them profitable. Their innovation is applied research and differentiation.
Signals
Observable indicators of change in the landscape that help you anticipate evolution and competitors' moves. They can come from inside your organisation, such as product usage data, or from outside it, such as market trends.
Simon Wardley
The creator of Wardley Maps, who developed the method in 2005 while CEO of Fotango.
Situational Awareness
Your level of understanding of the environment — your ability to anticipate what will happen. The less you are surprised by how a situation unfolds, the higher your situational awareness.
Spend Control
A way of encouraging people to map before any significant resources are invested into a project. Mapping is added as a mandatory step to the project execution process.
Stage
One of the four stages of evolution: Genesis, Custom-Built, Product (+rental), and Commodity (+utility).
Strategy
A context-specific approach to competing in a landscape. In Wardley Mapping it is the whole strategy cycle, not a single plan.
Strategy Cycle
The cycle of purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, and leadership, adapted from Sun Tzu's five factors, that you go round continuously. Wardley combines it with John Boyd's OODA Loop and the two whys (Why of Purpose and Why of Movement).
T
Town Planners
People who take something and industrialise it, taking advantage of economies of scale. They find ways to make things faster, better, smaller, more efficient, more economic and good enough. They build the services that pioneers build upon. Their type of innovation is industrial research.
Transitional
A domain associated with reducing uncertainty, declining production costs, increasing volumes and highest profitability. However, the future opportunity is in decline as the act becomes more widespread and well-defined.
Type
The classification of a component: Activity, Practice, Data, or Knowledge. Each type evolves through its own set of stages.
U
Uncertainty
How confident potential users are that a given solution will meet their needs. Less evolved components carry more uncertainty.
Uncharted
A domain associated with high production costs, high levels of uncertainty but potentially very high future opportunity. Being first is not always the best option due to the burden and risks of research and development.
User Needs
The anchor of a Wardley Map. Understanding and meeting user needs is the starting point for all strategic mapping.
Users
The people or entities whose needs anchor the top of a Wardley Map. Users can include customers, shareholders, regulators, and staff.
Utility
The utility form of the Commodity (+utility) stage. Infrastructure exists to deliver the component when you need it (e.g. electricity lines, cloud computing), so you no longer have to obtain or install it yourself.
V
Value Chain
A diagram representing components and their requirements, forming a chain from the user need down through all dependencies.
Visibility
The distance from the user to a component. The more intermediary components on the path from the user, the less visible a component is.
W
Wardley Map
A map of the components needed to meet a user need. The vertical axis is the value chain, with components placed higher the more visible they are to the user; the horizontal axis is evolution, from Genesis through Custom-Built and Product (+rental) to Commodity (+utility).
Weak Signals
At first sight, unimportant events which, upon closer inspection, may indicate significant changes. They are based on correlation and can be easily concealed, but it is very difficult to hide them all. Examples include a customer avoiding you before a contract renewal, or a third reorganisation in a year.
Why of Movement
Understanding why you should move one direction over another — the strategic rationale for action based on landscape analysis.
Why of Purpose
Common goal-based focus of business strategy that typically manifests in company mission and vision statements. Example: "Build the first settlement on Mars by 2117."
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Explore the Training Syllabus
These terms and concepts are covered across the Foundation and Practitioner Level syllabi.