I’ve been wanting to understand what makes Wardley Mapping so incredibly useful to some and so completely inaccessible to others. After a conversation with Chris Donnelly, I offered the following prompt on Twitter:

Reflecting on yesterday… If mapping is the solution, what is the problem? pic.twitter.com/NfbBtdzP1f

— ben (@HiredThought) July 22, 2019

I share my initial thoughts in the video, but I really wanted to hear from the rest of you. Here are some of the interesting responses…

Business Architecture

Any BusArch folks out there want to affirm/refute Peter’s and my thinking here? I’m really curious to learn more about it.

Common Language

No doubt in my mind that mapping together forces at least some convergence on the words we use. Extremely useful, but underrated.

Focus / Anti-Focus

Anticipating and Introducing Change

If you can anticipate the effects of change at large, you can evaluate whether the changes you introduce on purpose will be beneficial.

Erotetics

This is getting meta. Or is it?

Vision

Co-orientation

Co-orientation is my new favorite word. How can we orient to the world together? Love it!

Situational Awareness

Good-natured discussion is always welcome on topics like this one.

Situational awareness describes what mapping provides really well (I imagine that’s why Simon uses it). How could we describe situational awareness as it applies to business/organization in plain language?

Alignment

This is such an interesting thought! What does the creation of alignment with mapping look like? Probably lots of discarded, messy maps. Could we share more of those?

Revenge

Someone better call @vgr to make a 2×2 for us! Oh wait, what’s this? Oh no!

Parting Thoughts

As we’ve seen in this post, Wardley Mapping solves many wonderful problems for many wonderful people. But what’s not listed here? And what’s not included in the book?

Back when I made the “100 reasons” thread, I wasn’t thinking as critically as I needed to. I covered old, easy ground, when the value was in the new and difficult.

Tweetstorm inbound: 100 Reasons to Learn Wardley Mapping. // @swardley pic.twitter.com/z0bv6uFdZj

— ben (@HiredThought) March 24, 2018

Now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and dig into the problems and assumptions behind contexts where Wardley Mapping is a valid solution. This is something I will continue to pursue, and I look forward to hearing more from everyone in the community.