By Chris Daniel
Throughout history, maps have been essential in just about every strategy. They help us understand why we take action, how we can outmanoeuvre rivals and where our escape routes are if things go wrong. Business competition can also be viewed as a landscape, and thus the value chain of customers, suppliers, activities and processes can be broadly mapped. IT is radically changing the competitive landscape and those firms that see the playing field clearly, will be more likely to anticipate the future and deploy effective strategies.
By undertaking this course, you will learn about:
- The principles of mapping and how to relate them to your business
- Value Chains, and their role in defining Strategy
- Evolution in a map (showing how a superior, but expensive solution is inevitably replaced by a barely-good-enough, but commoditized version.)
- The phases of Evolution
- How to anticipate the future by looking at economic patterns
- Approaches to component development — one size does not fit all.
Wardley Maps can help you to better identify uncertainty and associated risks in delivering value to your customers. They allow us to anticipate what’s going to happen in the future and to avoid irreversible decisions that may hamper our operations down the road. Maps help us understand and handle inertia, and to remove unnecessary duplication of effort. They help us to outsource using commoditized components, increasing our ability to respond to changing environments. Finally, Wardley Maps enable us to discover inefficiencies — for example, where people are working on projects to which they’re not suited, and are, therefore, working much more slowly than might be expected.
Keeping your organization fit is not a one-off exercise — it requires continuous effort. Wardley Maps can be applied over and over again, and regular Map Reviews can keep your organization delivering value to your customers by manipulating both your own — and your competitors’ — value chains.
With Wardley Maps, your organization can stop self-harm and get fit!
