(2021-08-15) Simon Wardley On Mapping Our Way To A Common Language

Simon Wardley on Wardley Mapping Our Way to a Common Language (shared language). ...being applied to complex issues ranging from distributed systems in the cloud to billions in cost savings to the climate emergency to each of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

I used to run a company called Fotango. We had brilliant engineers and everything else, but the executive in me was completely clueless. And I realized over time that part of the problem was that I couldn’t actually perceive my landscape at all.

Sun Tzu talked of five factors that mattered:

The most basic thing is: understand your landscape

So I had to create a way of mapping. And I used that from 2005 onwards.

I ended up running strategy for a company called Canonical, with a friend of mine Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Ubuntu [publisher of open source operating system on Linux]. I used that to map out the cloud space, and we went from 2-3% of the operating system market to 70% of cloud in 18 months. It cost us about half a million.

These three images at the top are all graphs, and they are all identical. So it’s three different places — Nottingham, London, Dover, connected by two roads M1 and M2.

the fundamental difference between a graph and a map is that in a map space has meaning

If you want to create a map, you need three basic characteristics:
The anchor or magnetic north
Position of pieces (ie: North, South, East, West and distance)
Consistency of movement

it turns out, there’s a common pattern by which capital evolves. And this is a map.

the main thing about maps is that they are imperfect representations of the space

they’re all models.

but they tend to be quite useful for getting us to challenge things and discuss things as well.

I made it all Creative Commons [open sourced] — there’s about 600 pages of book there. There’s now an entire community. We now have something called Map Camp. Last year 1,300 people from all over the world turned up

There are 40 basic principles of mapping [also called Doctrine Patterns], beginning with:
Have a common language — the map
Have focus on the user. (Anchor #1 at the top.)

The worst I’ve seen in the private sector is, well, we stopped counting at a particular bank which had built risk management systems over 1,000 times. And it was constantly complaining it couldn’t innovate. And somebody said “How can we survive against others if we’re that bad?” Well, the reason is the others were just as bad.

When we talk about disruption, there are actually two different types — which you can’t see if you don’t map:

• Predictable disruptors: product-to-utility substitution, highly predictable
• Non-predictable disruptors: product-product substitution, like Apple versus Nokia

anthropologists are the experts on culture. And they spent 140 years and they can’t define what that [culture] is.

If language is part of culture, you will not be able to describe culture with language alone. And that started me down a journey of mapping out values and ethical values and systems, looking at things like universal basic income, workers’ rights, civil rights, etcetera. And these were values or beliefs and I expanded out from that.

You can only do [mapping principle] “challenge assumptions” effectively if there is psychological safety within an organization, and that depends on the memories of people within that organization. And that’s connected up to values.

Mapping case Ubuntu.

it was once a minor player with less than 3% market share. Ubuntu used maps to better understand the industry landscape and discover which of their bigger, but slower-moving rivals they could attack. They managed to capture 70% market share within 18 months.

The story started in 2008 when Simon Wardley (the creator of Wardley Maps on which PowerMaps are based) and a small team at Ubuntu mapped out the entire server market.

The strategy put in play was to:
Accept that RedHat owned the server operating system (OS) — for now
Go after the future instead by making Ubuntu so simple to use that it became the dominant Guest OS on any future cloud service
Acquire an open source private cloud (that imitated the dominant player) to help target customers transition to the new offering