Happy Monday!
I'm Cory Foy, and welcome to this week's Mapping Monday.
Often when we think about Wardley Mapping, we dive into
the "mapping" part of it. But mapping is a tool
used to look at our landscapes, and figure out what
gameplays we can make. And we can't get there without a
common operating model - our doctrine.
The word doctrine certainly conjures up a military context
filled with rigid structures and a single
way of thinking. But the US Army defines doctrine
as the fundamental principles by which the military
forces - or elements thereof - guide their actions
in support of national objectives. In other words
it's a body of thought on how they operate together
focusing on how to think, not what to think.
Similar to how the military took
past experience and turned them into fundamental principles
Wardley lists a set of doctrine, defining
them as universally useful patterns
that can be applied regardless of context.
While there are several ways he presents them
I find the division into six key categories - Communication,
Development, Operation, Structure
Learning and Leading - to be a
great way of breaking them down. So over the next
several weeks, we'll take each of these categories
and dive deeper into the doctrine within them.
But let's not wait! Our first category, communication,
is perhaps one of the most vital sets of principles
we can tackle. Our organizations have lots
of people with amazing information that can help us
but only if we let them.
Simon's doctrines within communications are Be Transparent,
Focus on High Situational Awareness,
Use a Common Language, and Challenge Assumptions.
Transparency is something we say we all
strive for, but can be hard in practice.
Many of us like to be story tellers - a hero,
bringing the ideas that will save our organizations
or create the next big thing.
Or, we don't like people to see things
messy, afraid they'll think we don't know what we're doing.
So this first doctrine principle of
Be Transparent is about turning that around.
We should bias everything toward being
open, we should share out maps, we should share
our strategies, our approaches and our gameplays
as wide as we possibly can to get the most
input and insights. This also means
we'll get their concerns, their challenges,
the messiness to our perfect story.
We should be prepared for that. Rather than ignore it
and let the market - or our competitors -
show us our flaws.
Transparency doesn't mean making all
our private conversations public. We should have more
awareness than that. Which happens to be Wardley's
second doctrine principle - focus on
Situational Awareness. The guidance I give organizations
I work with is that you need systematic methods
for analyzing and evaluating what's happening
around you. Wardley Maps are, of course,
a great way of doing that. As an example,
let's pretend that Amazon just announced
they're moving into your market. The first thing you need isn't
a response, it's a map of what exactly
it appears they are doing, and how that fits into -
or disrupts - the current landscape you
operate in. The other aspect I tie
closely with situational awareness is Commander's Intent.
This is the notion that, as a leader,
your teams understand the intent of their actions
and how they fit in to the overall strategy.
As another example. let's say you're trying to compete
in a disruptive market that requires a lot of exploration.
You may direct your operations teams to
reduce costs. But they should understand that
in a high discovery phase, we don't want to lock down
all capacity to the minimums. We're going to have
some waste as we move along the path and stabilize.
Otherwise, they may march towards making things
as lean as possible at the detriment to
your disrupting teams. The third
doctrine principle is Use a Common Language.
In the Lean world, we refer to this as Standard Work.
Standardized work is the playbook.
It's what the team has decided is the best way
at this point in time to get the job done and succeed
on a daily basis. So we should make sure
that people understand roles, approaches and terms,
as well as things like movement in a map, what mapping
is, and the approaches and gameplays we want to take.
And, we should create checkpoints for verifying
that we're all talking about the same things.
And have a common repository for reference we can
update when we're not. The final doctrine
principle under communication is Challenge Assumptions.
One of the most powerful statements I got was
from Jabe Bloom who told me "The people telling
the story determine what's possible in the story."
That means not only should we be comfortable
challenging assumptions - as Wardley says, there's no place
for ego if you want to learn - we should also
create methods for allowing those assumptions to be exposed.
To highlight this, let's imagine we
got this paragraph from our Chief Product Officer.
It sounds reasonable, but it also feels like
there's something not right. But how do you
challenge it - how do you pick apart the
pieces that don't feel right without the
storyteller feeling like you're picking
them apart? But now, let's attach a map
to this statement. Now we can ask questions about
why we're choosing this attack versus another.
What the dangers of competitors evolving a key
component before we can. And even questioning some key
elements the tactics were based on.
Cat Swetel says that Wardley Mapping is the
democratization of strategy and that's what makes it so important.
Transparency, situational awareness
common language, challenging assumptions.
It's a lot for one week! But I have confidence
you'll find ways to start the journey in your organization.
And if you have questions, need help, or just want to let me know
how it's going, feel free to reach out on Twitter at cory_foy
or via email at hello at coryfoy dot com.
Until next week, here's to challenging ourselves!