VISUALISING STRATEGY
The Art of Strategy: Wardley Mapping Examples
Annex: A curated collection of Wardley Maps
What is strategy? Why do you need it? How do you do it? And, how can you be more certain to succeed? The Art of Strategy provides timeless answers to these eternal questions. It is a modern reading of Sun Tzu’s Art of War using the lenses of strategists John Boyd and Simon Wardley (swardley). All parts. Other reading formats.
This is a growing collection of Wardley Maps for visualising strategy, irregularly updated since 2019. The idea is to inspire people to strategise visually using Wardley Maps by providing examples from different business/technology domains.
I do love this. It is fantastic.
— Simon Wardley (swardley), inventor of Wardley MappingAn amazing collection of Wardley Maps on all kinds of different topics — fantastic!
— Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team TopologiesThe most extensive collection of Wardley map examples anywhere!
— Johan Persson, strategy and innovation expertWonderful collection!
— Holger Gelhausen, strategy and change expert
Updated November 23, 2024: 151 Wardley Maps from different domains listed in alphabetical order of the creator’s first name.
Core Banking in the Embedded Finance Age
akohli (1 min read)
One big aspect of the shift to embedded finance is the opening up of opportunities for things like super apps and multi-purpose wallets.
Delegation Zone for AI Tasks
Alastair Moore (1 min read)
Which (subset of) tasks are inside or outside the frontier for AI?
TV Company
Alastair Moore (1 min read)
Building Products to Verify Product Market Fit
Aleix Morgadas (4 min read)
Personal Value Proposition
Aleix Morgadas (1 min read)
The Future of Development Environments
Aleix Morgadas (5 min read)
Mapping DevOps Practices
Andreas Schliep (2 min read)
Mapping the DORA research findings revealed how the evolution of DevOps practices affects software delivery and organisational efficiency.
Digital Assessment for Primary School Children in the UK
Andrew (3 min read)
Remote Work Has Crossed the Chasm
Andrew Blain (4 min read)
On remote work, trust, and working from anywhere in the future.
Mapping People Operations / Human Resource (HR)
Andrey Kulikov (10 min read)
Mapping people operations/Human Resource (HR) activities including how each HR-related component can evolve further.
Exploring the Mining Value Chain
Barry Smart (11 min read)
How the mining industry benefits from digitalisation and explores future digital strategies.
Exploring Strategies for a Data-Driven Organisation
Barry Smart (9 min read)
How to transform your data processing including the Microsoft product ecosystem.
Ecosystem Gameplay: Microsoft & GitHub
Chris Adams (12 min read)
Reverse engineering Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub as an example of the Innovate, Leverage, Commoditize (ILC) gameplay.
Plotting a Path to a Greener Web
Chris Adams (15 min read)
How Green Web Foundation uses open data and open source to help speed the transition to an internet running on renewable power, e.g. showing energy flow between components in a map of digital services.
The Cloud Battle
Chris Adams (7 min read)
Reverse engineering the cloud battle — Amazon vs OpenStack and OpenCloud — illustrating different game plays, e.g. using openness to attack a choke point.
Batteries
Chris Daniel (Krzysztof Daniel) (1 min read)
A battery supply chain as a Wardley Map.
Evernote, Notion, Roam and Todoist
Chris Daniel (Krzysztof Daniel) (1 min read)
I’d rather see Todoist and Evernote merge instead of competing. Evernote is a digital archive, and people have built all sorts of solutions on top of that. Roam and Notion try to industrialise two very specific aspects of note-taking (linking and analytics), but they lack the capture part.
Gameplay Examples
Chris Daniel (Krzysztof Daniel) (20 min read)
Basic Constraints: silicon industry specialisation vs generalisation.
Embrace & Extend: Sun vs Microsoft re: Java Virtual Machine.
Customer Isolation: Microsoft vs Amazon re: cloud using GitHub.
Threat Acquisition: Blockbuster and Netflix.
Signal Distortion: UBI Blockchain Internet, Google+, Samsung.
Vertical Movements: Tesco Beauty, Ford Innovation Center, Tesla.
Fighting with “Open”: Linux vs Windows, LibreOffice vs OpenOffice, RedHat.
Influencing Your Customers: Blackberry, NJU Mobile, MediaMarkt & Saturn.
Telecom Operators
Chris Daniel (Krzysztof Daniel) (2 min read)
Telcos should be considered part of the national infrastructure, along with roads, water and electricity.
Context-Specific Capability Assessments
Chris McDermott (7 min read)
Maturity Mapping is an innovative evolution of Wardley Mapping informed by Dave Snowden’s Cynefin. It helps us move beyond traditional maturity models and instead make context-specific assessments to guide future learning and improvements based on the needs of the team, the organisation and the customers.
Navigating Product Development with Wardley Mapping
Cory Foy (66 min video)
Connecting climatic patterns, doctrine and gameplays for product development.
Saving Your Business with Wardley Maps
Cory Foy (39 min video)
A fictional case study based on real-world events in navigating strategic threats and situational awareness to create winning gameplays.
Continuous Digital Transformation at Gitlab
Darwin Sanoy (1 min ready)
The Value Flywheel (from the book The Value Flywheel Effect by David Anderson, Mark McCann and Michael O’Reilly) for GitLab. Digital activity is continuous and a proper platform like GitLab offers much more than a one-time hit.
Wardley Mapping a Conference
David Anderson and Mark McCann (12 min read)
Amazon’s Market Dominance
Dwayne Monroe (3 min read)
Understanding the Data Landscape and Its Evolution
Ergest Xheblati (9 min read)
Analysis of data, usage and evolution.
The Art of Change
Erik Schön (5 min read)
Visualising the I Ching’s eternal wisdom for sustainably successful change in turbulent times.
The Art of Leadership
Erik Schön (5 min read)
Visualising Lao Tzu’s eternal wisdom for sustainably successful leadership in turbulent times.
The Art of Strategy
Erik Schön (5 min read)
Visualising the eternal wisdom of strategists Sun Tzu, John Boyd and Simon Wardley (swardley) for sustainable success in turbulent times.
Visual Reader’s Guide
Erik Schön (5 min read)
Visualising a table of contents/index using a value chain provides a reader’s guide to a book. Inspired by michaelhaber.
World-Class Software Development
Erik Schön (14 min read)
Visualising patterns for successful software development from Steve Denning’s Learning Consortium — including Spotify, Riot Games, Microsoft and Ericsson.
Skills as a System
Guy Dickinson (8 min read)
An alternative way to talk about skills that removes the bias inherent in those discussions helping leaders decide right away but still plan for change.
Medical Backend as a Service
Hans de Leenheer (1 min read)
An entire business model explained by a simple Wardley Map.
Platform Gameplay: Amazon’s Game Engine
Howard Rees (4 min read)
Reverse engineering Amazon’s cloud-hosted game engine (Lumberyard) looking at the parallels to Amazon’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) gameplays in cloud computing and big data platforms.
Mapping Immersive Experiences at BBC
Jacob Clark (11 min read)
Transforming the BBC’s way of building and delivering educational apps and games including an exemplary use of maps at work to understand where each of the components required to ship the apps sit in terms of the maturity against the value they deliver.
Food, Meta-Programs and the Environment
James Fairbairn (2 min read)
What does it take to “go regenerative” from a food standpoint including what enablers and inhibitors might be for replacing a damaging model with a healthier one.
Mapping Data Flow
James Urquhart
Real-time business automation, or, stream processing in a business setting, e.g. using Kafka and RabbitMQ.
- The basic architecture of data flow (5 min)
- The data flow value chain (7 min)
- A simple Wardley Map of data flow (7 min)
- Adding context to the Wardley Map of data flow (7 min)
- Applying doctrine to data flow (8 min)
- Gameplay for data flow (8 min)
What in the World is World-Class Engineering?
J. D. Carlston (9 min read)
How to visualise “world-classiness” and the attributes world-class engineers, teams, and organisations have.
AI-Driven ServiceNow Development
Jesse Szepieniec (5 min read)
How to Combat Illegal Fishing
Jess Panni (11 min video)
AI as The New Blue Ocean of Legal Loopholes
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (4 min read)
Digital Platforms are very competitive, and it’s not only due to technology. Lack of awareness and laws make them act like the Wild West. A Wardley Map extending to the social and public space.
Amazon’s Sensing Engines
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (4 min read)
A Review of the Alphabet Company
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (5 min read)
A Wardley Map of the Company NVIDIA in 2020
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (4 min read)
Analysis of Nvidia and the semiconductor ecosystem across the three zones: peace (growth in data centres), war (commoditised chips used for general-purpose computing and graphics) and wonder (innovation to meet needs like massive computation required for AI).
AWS Cloud Economics
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Building New Capabilities in Google’s Environment
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (5 min read)
Autodesk’s massive shift from product (license-based) to service over more than three years.
Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Competitive Analysis
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (2 min read)
A pre-mortem analysis of what is happening at the end of 2022 with the CBDCs of the main economies: China, the US and Europe.
Choices on Generative AI Solutions
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
In purple, the basic reasons why you do not have a choice in many cases.
Computer Assisted Translation Tools
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (3 min read)
Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools have existed for more than ten years and there are many things we can learn from this ecosystem, e.g. adding new features, accelerating high-quality translations and consistency.
Consulting Companies vs Software-as-a-Service Companies
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Consulting and SaaS companies play in different landscapes, and their games are very different as they try to move in different directions. Consulting = high value and SaaS = efficient value. Each business has its own constraints and inertia.
Cyber Security Threats
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Only visualising the user Bad Actor.
Adding the user Good Actor.
Draw Your Company Strategy
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Equation of Innovation for a Software Product (B2C)
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (5 min read)
How innovation and learning can work in a software organisation developing a product for many users.
Evolution of a Professional Basketball Franchise
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (7 min read)
The evolution of a franchise depends on the evolution of its components: culture, organisation structure, team and players.
Evolution of Autodesk
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (10 min read)
Evolution of Frictions into Inertia
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
How to avoid inertia by sensing friction like technical debt and organisational debt.
From Search to Prompt
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (2 min read)
November 13, 2023 version includes new ways of monetization.
How AWS Takes Advantage of Open Source Projects
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (4 min read)
How Facebook is Trying to Become a Metaverse Company
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (11 min read)
How Facebook is trying to create a new revenue tower using augmented reality, virtual reality and different use cases.
How Will Cars Be Refueled by 2032?
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (5 min read)
If Microsoft took Google to dance, Facebook has stripped it
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (3 min read)
Google: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”.
Innovate, Leverage, Commoditize Gameplays for LLMs Providers
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Innovate, leverage, commodities (ILC) gameplays by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, …
May 20, 2024. Last week, OpenAI announced Improvements to data analysis in ChatGPT where they are exploiting data stored in competitors’ silos. These silos have potential value, and they are exploited in some ways by individuals. Education of users in a “different way of doing things” continues. And again, OpenAI wants to be between their sers and other competitors.
Mapping the Future Based on the Present
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Understanding today’s user behaviours and future user behaviours is challenging.
Noisy Features
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (3 min read)
Some solutions try to increase value and/or monetize more, breaking the law of the needs. You can try to anticipate to user needs, but you need to respect the natural pace of evolution of needs. When this pace is not respected, then it provokes noise.
Platform “Enshittification”
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (4 min read)
Illustrating enshittification coined by Cory Doctorow, happening to nearly everything: entice, capture, extract.
Streaming Syndication and Content Licensing
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (3 min read)
Streaming syndication has become increasingly common with the rise of various streaming services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, and others. These platforms often compete to secure exclusive rights to popular shows, movies, and original content to entice users to subscribe to their services.
Twitter as a Public and Private Company
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (5 min read)
Print on Demand Services
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (2 min read)
Print-on-demand services available worldwide enable designers to produce and commercialise their products in different geographic areas.
Product-Market Fit for Startup Investments
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Sequoia’s framework is for understanding the market fit of the startups in which they are willing to invest.
Qualitative Analysis of Venture Capital
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (1 min read)
Reviewing the Evolution of Neeva Search Engine
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (7 min read)
October 2021
January 2023
May 2023
Social Media Investment Trust
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (6 min read)
How to manage conversations as a valuable asset and bring profits from it to the public.
The World of Video Games
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (11 min read)
The video games industry from the beginning to the future.
Web Versions
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (2 min read)
Perspectives on what is being built on the web.
Zalando, a Wardley Map About How They Play the Game
Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen) (5 min read)
Zalando continues evolving and gaining a presence in Europe’s online retail business.
Visualising Innovation Strategy
Johan Persson (13 min read)
Mapping Methods and Context
John Cutler (1 min read)
The challenge is viewing the practice (OKRs in this example) in the broader context. When people say “Oh, let’s do X” they often leave out the bigger picture.
Marketing and …
John Cutler (1 min read)
Wardley Mapping helps since it lets you explore the interplay of “functional” skills (like content writing and storytelling) and domain expertise, customer access, and research. It also adds a different perspective to a flat list of capabilities.
Amazon Outmaneuvering Competition in the Cloud
John Duffy (5 min read)
Amazon isn’t just big; it can out-think you too. Wardley Maps are one of their tools. Our friends made a Facial Recognition (FR) system specifically for Fraud Detection on AWS …
How To Not Sabotage Your Transformation
Jonathan Allen (10 min read)
Advice from a key Amazon Web Services (AWS) player on reaching cloud velocity using Wardley Maps.
Turning Around IBM, Part 1
Julius Gamanyi (10 min read)
Reverse-engineering Gerstner’s IBM in the 90s by looping through the Strategy Cycle illustrating how initiatives change doctrine.
Turning Around IBM, Part 2
Julius Gamanyi (10 min read)
Reverse-engineering Gerstner’s IBM in the 90s by looping through the Strategy Cycle illustrating how initiatives change doctrine.
Turning Around IBM, Part 3
Julius Gamanyi (10 min read)
Reverse-engineering Gerstner’s IBM in the 90s by looping through the Strategy Cycle illustrating how initiatives change doctrine.
UK Electrical Supply — Consumer Renewables and Loads
Lawrence Griffiths (1 min read)
Developer Experience Design System (DXDS)
Kamran Ayub (4 min read)
Establishing baseline standards and approaches for designing experiences for developer education like docs, courses, demos, other learning experiences, etc.
State of the Rescript Ecosystem
Leandro Ostera (1 min read)
Identifying a gap in best practices and common patterns, where some commoditisation would help train folks faster and achieve better-quality development.
Corporate Learning
Luke Radford (1 min read)
Reverse Engineering AirBnB’s StratAirBnB’solm Silberman (14 min read)
Including an in-depth visual analysis of potential gameplays available to AirBnB.
Social Innovation: Outsourcing vs Developing In-House
Manuaguileras (5 min read)
Helping a team visualise the whole value chain and better analyse the risks of outsourcing or developing our own technology, making wiser decisions regarding which capabilities needed to be developed within the team.
Mapping the Porn Industry
Mark Craddock (5 min read)
Another view:
The Future of Prompt Engineering
Mark Craddock (6 min read)
The core components, their relationships, and the trends shaping the future of Prompt Engineering: an emerging field that focuses on designing, developing, and deploying systems to generate context-aware, human-like responses in various applications. Prompt Engineering — including prompt crafting — combines machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence to create powerful systems capable of generating personalised and contextual user responses. Presentation (10-minute video). Latest map of prompt engineering. Animation of capital flows.
Latest version from February 12, 2024.
Details on tokenisers from March 12, 2024.
Algorithmic Decision Support and Machine Learning in Healthcare
Mark Wardle (2 min read)
Healthcare Information Technology Strategy
Mark Wardle (9 min read)
How can we make the best use of technology to support healthcare?
Paying Bills in 2010s and 2020s
Matthias Patzak (41 min video)
2010s
2020s
How Open Source Machine Learning Shapes AI
Max Langenkamp (15 min read)
Machine Learning Open Source Software (MLOSS) is an important yet neglected factor shaping the trajectory of AI.
Refined by Joaquín Peña Fernández (joapen)
Security Evolution
Michael Brunton-Spall (1 min read)
Behaviour Change
michaelhaber (1 min read)
Contents of a Book
michaelhaber (1 min read)
As a reader of a (potentially useful) book, you should be able to make a Wardley Map of it. And, as the author, you should have a map of your book.
Metaverse Impact
Minhaj Malik (5 min read)
Metaverse in its current state (August 2023).
Metaverse in five years.
Complexity in a Data Value Chain
Nick Jenkins (8 min read)
Modern data strategy to unlock the flow of value in your data.
Sustainable Aviation
Paul Comis (1 min read)
Societal Benefit of Art
Paul Johnston (1 min read)
Visualising the Work of a Software Delivery Lead
Peter Pito (1 min read)
Agile Governance Reporting
Pete Tansey (Agilepete)
How do you design agile governance to grow high-performing teams?
Printing of Clothes
Philippe Guenet (58 min video)
3D printing of clothes could complement the value chain of fashion retailers.
Your CV as a Wardley Map
Philippe Guenet (1 min read)
AI Impacts on “Build vs Buy” for Corporate Website
Philip Schmitt (12 min read)
Global Software-as-a-Service Brand from India
Prasanna K (1 min read)
Apple’s Augmented Reality
Robert Taylor (1 min read)
Improving the OCaml Toolchain
Ryan Winchester & Leandro Ostera (1 min read)
Identifying that the one thing needed to make deploying OCaml apps super easy is generating a Docker file when building your app or initialising a project.
Carbon Mapper
Shanti Ray (20 min read)
Carbon Mapper measures the methane leaks that are responsible for a significant fraction of global warming.
Why Platform (Aggregation) Strategies Are Key
Simone Cicero (5 min read)
James Currier’s “marCurrier’sr“s” are becoming” key as the world evolves into niches.
Artificial Intelligence
Simon Wardley (swardley) (1 min read)
On knowledge tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs), societal change and trust.
Automobiles 2015–2025
Simon Wardley (swardley) (3 min read)
In 2015, you could imagine a world in 2025 in which we increasingly don’t own cars and don’t pay for them on a utility basis.
Books, Game and Claude — by Claude
Simon Wardley (swardley) (2 min read)
Books — by Claude.
Game — by Claude.
AI assistant (Claude) — by Claude
Building a Business From a Great Idea Using AWS Lambda Services
Simon Wardley (swardley) (10 min read)
A future scenario of how we build a business to explore the potential of AWS Lambda services.
Defence Supply Chain
Simon Wardley (swardley) (1 min read)
Evolving Social Networks Through Culture
Simon Wardley (swardley) (5 min read)
Encouraging positive values through behaviours and building a wealth of positive memories to kick off a positive feedback loop inside the cultural system will help others join the network.
Leading an Organisation
Simon Wardley (swardley) (15 min read)
Experiences in leading an organisation using situational awareness through mapping, including a phased approach to doctrine.
Leveraging Diverse Expertise
Simon Wardley (swardley) (6 min read)
Working with different characteristics of evolution and showing how experts (both generalists and specialists) from different fields can share and communicate with each other preventive healthcare through the use of maps and thereby improve the maps.
Telecom Evolution
Simon Wardley (swardley) (1 min read)
Why is Jeff Bezos launching satellites?
Using Agile vs Being Agile
Simon Wardley (swardley) (5 min read)
There is a chasm between using agile and being agile. To cross it, you must realise that agile methods don’t work everywhere. There isn’t a magic one-size-fits-all solution so use appropriate methods for the job to be done.
Why the Fuss About Conversational Programming?
Simon Wardley (swardley) (14 min read)
What comes after serverless? Conversational programming!
Part 1, Part 2
Regulating Technology Feudalism
Simon Wondracek (1 min)
Serverless Development
Slobodan Stojanović (7 min read)
A tale of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda development showing what problem serverless development solves — illustrated by maps.
Evolution of Battery Tech and Its Impacts on Robotics
Steve Purkis (5 min read)
Barriers To Be Aware of in Strategy Creation
“The Strategy “lub” (1 min read)”
Tesla’s Quest Tesla’sressing Environmental Effects
Tiani Jones, Yuliya Yatsyshina, Johnicholas Hines (1 min)
Traditional Life Industry
Tim Vieyra (1 min read)
Evolution of Architectural Components in Software Systems
Tom Asel (26 min video)
Mapping the Blog
Tomasz Onyszko (9 min read)
Why I decided to pay for a blog platform instead of building my own.
Code Base Evolution
Tristan Slominski (5 min read)
An example of a “zoomed in” Node.js component with a planned obsolescence pattern that is readily visualizable on a map.
Please let me know your favorite Wardley Mapping example and I will include it!
The Art of Strategy: All Parts
Contents: A very short summary of each part
Introduction: What is strategy and why do you need it?
- Assessments: How to assess, prepare and shape
- Challenges: How to use and reduce inertia, entropy and friction
- Success: How to succeed together with stakeholders
- Setup: How to create resilience
- Momentum: How to use creativity, focus and timing
- Shaping: How to shape and avoid being shaped
- Engagement: How to engage using surprise
- Adaptations: How to adapt to shifting situations
- Movements: How to move to optimise momentum
- Landscape: How to approach difficult areas
- Situations: How to handle difficult situations
- Disruption: How to disrupt and avoid being disrupted
- Intelligence: How to use intelligence to create foreknowledge
Annex: Wardley Mapping Examples
Glossary: Explanation of key terms and symbols
Acknowledgements: Standing on the shoulders of giants
Sources: Where to learn more
Other reading formats: Hardcover, paperback and PDF
This text is provided as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International by the author, Erik Schön.
Wardley Mapping is provided courtesy of Simon Wardley (swardley) and licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
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