10 reasons why your organisation needs to start mapping

Every great strategic leader in history knew the importance of maps. Maps enabled them to quickly see the landscape they were in and identify winning moves. Without maps, they would have been operating blindly, hoping they were not leading their forces over a cliff or into a minefield.

A growing number of organisations today have discovered the power of maps. Leaders at Amazon, AirBnB, Netflix, NASA, Salesforce, Shopify and many more are using Wardley Maps for strategy and execution. Maps enable them to anticipate how their industries are changing and make smarter moves.

Maps address a lot of problems organisations today have. If any of the descriptions below describe your organisation then maps can help you:

1. We don’t know what our customers need — we focus on trying to make great products or services and just hope customers will buy them
2. We don’t have a common language — different silos use different methods for describing the same situations (spreadsheets, business process diagrams, stories etc) causing confusion and misalignment
3. We have no transparency — we struggle to see what the entire organisation is doing because information tends to be guarded in silos
4. We don’t challenge assumptions — we follow the Hippo (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or whatever is popular in the Harvard Business Review and end up doing lots of things most of us think won’t work
5. We have significant duplication and bias — we often re-invent the wheel or outsource the wrong things
6. We don’t use appropriate methods — we keep trying to implement the“one right way of doing things” across the entire organisation (e.g. “Agile everywhere!”) and blame ‘implementation’ when it fails (again!)
7. We fail to think small — we have big ideas but lack the internal coordination to make them work because we fail to focus on the details
8. We don’t organise for aptitude and attitude — we’re organised into departments (aptitudes) and miss the opportunity to get innovative people (attitudes) from across silos working together on breakthrough projects
9. We fail to design for constant evolution — every couple of years we go through another organisational revolution (‘Go Agile’, ‘Spotify model’ etc.) with huge costs and low results, rather than constantly evolving each day
10. We fail to provide our people with purpose, mastery and autonomy — there’s no clarity about the organisation’s real purpose, leading to widespread confusion about what people should do to contribute better.

So, if you are stuck in endless meetings, discussing the same things again and again but nothing ever seems to change it’s because of some or all of the above. It’s time you started using maps for your organisation.