 I'm Sebastian Shaw, Seb Shaw. I work as an agile coach and a few other things, primarily based in Gothenburg. I'm gonna talk to you today about mapping strategic choice, some approaches I've used, some understanding of that. I've got to say I'm really happy to see so many people coming in to listen to an English person, making decisions and how to stick to them, given the last three and a half years in my country. It'll end eventually, I'm sure it will. Good, so, do any of you know a tool or a mechanism called wardly mapping? Nope, great, this is gonna be a surprise to you. So my journey to discovering information about how I can use mapping to make strategic choices was focused on how do I help my clients be more effective at making strategic decisions? How do they get more information, get more detail on what's going on so that when they make a decision, it's as informed as it can be with a fast feedback loop? So, for me, this is a really great quote for outlining what strategy actually is. It's a guy called Max McEwan and its strategy is the human attempt to get the desirable ends with available means. So, where does the company want to get to? Where is your end goal? And then what are the things you can do in order to get to that point? What are the levers you can use? What are the resources you have available to you? So, we're gonna talk about both of those sides of this. What are desirable ends? Desirable ends, what are the end goal? What is the destination? Where is the company trying to get to? Now, what I've found is companies are actually quite good at setting a goal. They're quite good at understanding where they wanna get to. It's not always realistic where they want to get to, but they're quite good at going, yeah, we are going to be the biggest company in this industry. We are going to dominate this space. We are going to get to this point by this year. What they're not so good about is aligning that goal with the entire business, with getting that understanding out there. In fact, they're really quite bad at it. Something like 70% of the company doesn't get it when CEOs talk about strategy. When they're sat there talking about the goal, they're talking about the strategy, they're talking about what you're trying to get to, the end goal, one of the most important things for the business to be aligned on, 70% of the company doesn't get it, and that's all the way from the ground up to the senior management team, and that's a real problem. But why is that? Lots of reasons, but one of them, I think is illustrated quite nicely here. So, chatting to a friend of mine, coming up to Stockholm, checking in with the team, her response, ah, I wish I could go to exotic European cities as part of my work. Would you call Stockholm exotic? What are you from here? She is from a place called Townsville on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. For me, that's exotic. That's somewhere that's, ah, that's a place to go, that's a dream vacation. But for her, that's just every day, she looks out of a window and she sees this kind of stuff. Exotic to her is somewhere like Stockholm. Another good example, Jeff Bezos, two pizza team. I'm guessing pretty much everyone in the room is familiar with the idea of you don't want a team any bigger than can be fed by two pizzas. That's great. I come in as a new manager. I've been reading about Jeff Bezos. He's famous, he's rich, he's successful. I want to be like that. And I say, yeah, okay, great, you guys, I want a two pizza team to do this. Cool. If you're in America, 10 or 12 people, that's a two pizza team. Also, look how happy this guy is. He's got this whole thing to himself. If you're in the UK though, a two pizza team would probably be about four to six people. Our pizzas are smaller than Americans, but they're quite a bit bigger than a two pizza team would be in Sweden because generally your pizzas are fairly personal size. So if you've got three not very hungry people, maybe, but otherwise you're looking at two to three people as opposed to 10 to 12. Context, difference of opinion, difference of understanding is really, really important. And this is where a lot of strategy gets lost. That misunderstanding, that assumption that because you're speaking the same language, you've got a shared understanding of the desirable ends. A really interesting statistic I read a little while ago is the worst people at communicating in English to an international audience are the British and the Americans. We are the worst at it because it's our native language, we've got a lot of shortcuts, we've got implications, we've got metaphors and we throw them into our speech the entire time and I'm certain I've been doing it in this speech as well, even though I'm trying not to. Where you get much more effective and understanding communication is where two people are using a shared second language. So this is one of the problems, is how do you deal with the fact that when talking about strategy, which is a very complicated thing, even when the goal might seem simple to a CEO, how do you deal with that? How do you take that further? The other side of strategy is the available means. So what are the resources and methods available to a company? What are the things that can be used? What are the levels you can turn in order to reach your, sorry, I'm in the way. What are the things you can do in order to reach your desirable ends? Because you can't do everything. You can only do certain things and depending on what you have available, you can do certain things and one of the most common things you'll encounter is looking at what other companies have done out there, what have other successful people done and try to replicate it. So top habits of successful CEOs. You're a CEO, you wanna do what other successful CEOs are doing. That's gonna get you to where you wanna go. Well, don't use electronics in bed. Exercise and meditate. Create, oh no, oh, hang on. Browser tabs, opening automatically. Advantage your technology. Inspiring storytellers. All of these things are things that successful CEOs have done and therefore if you do them, you will be successful. You're not convinced. All right. How about the Spotify model? You know, same idea. Spotify did this. They were really, really successful. They followed the model. Therefore, pick this model up exactly as it is and ram it into your organization with no thought of the context of your organization. Do exactly this and you will be as successful as Spotify was 10 years ago when they started doing this. It's a great idea. I can't see any problems with it. What you're not asking when you're taking this, you're looking at the success. You're looking at the value that they got out of this and you're not looking at the decisions they made as to why they've done all of these things. You're looking at the correlation and you're thinking about causation. That's one of my favorite jokes. You still think correlation implied causation. Then I took a statistics class and now I don't. Oh, it sounds like the class helped. Maybe. I like it. I worked it in anyway. Some successful CEOs do these things. They have browser tabs open automatically. They've meditated. They've gone for a run in the morning. Therefore, that is the path to success. Spotify have followed this model. Therefore, it is the path to success. You need to understand the available means they had, the context they were operating in, in order to apply that to your own situation. It's not that following the Spotify model means you won't succeed, but you won't succeed because of the Spotify model. It might be coincidence. And if you don't understand the situation you're operating in, if you don't have the situational awareness of what is going on and why these decisions are relevant, then you don't know if it was successful because you've followed a model that's been successful in the past or because the model is relevant to the work you're doing. Situational awareness is knowing what is going on around us. You hear a huge amount of it when you read military history or tactics or strategy. There's a lot in firefighting and you're seeing it more and more being discussed in business because understanding the environment your business is operating on is key to being able to make an effective strategic decision because you can't understand and evaluate your available means unless you know how they apply in a wider context. So, how do we improve shared direction whilst improving situation while increasing situational awareness? That's the question. How do we, if we can do these two things we should end up better at strategy. And this is where we come on to Wardley mapping. Simon Wardley is the guy that came up with this. All of this is open under Creative Commons and I found a really helpful technique for understanding some of the options available to me and to my clients and how to talk about them. So, the overall approach is this is a strategy cycle. You've got the purpose, you've got the why, you've got the desirable ends. You've then got the landscape, the map of the competitive environment. What is it you are doing? What is your organization set up to do? What are the options available to you? What is the climate? So, the climate is the thing, the external things affecting the environment you're operating in. Maybe it's new legislation coming in. Maybe it's environmental changes across the world. The doctrines are the training and standard ways of working that your organization is adopting and utilizing. And then once you know the landscape, you know the climate, you know the doctrine, you obviously know your purpose, you can make a leadership decision, you can make a context dependent decision that feeds back into your purpose and it's a cycle that it goes through. Unfortunately, an awful lot of strategy works more like this. We set our purpose, we decide where we want our company to go and then we take a gut feel leadership decision. We go, I've worked in this industry for 20 years, I know we need to do this. I got up and meditated this morning, my browser tabs opened exactly as I expected them to. Therefore, I know how we can get to our purpose. And you might, but it also might be a sheer blind chance. So, how do we understand landscape? And this is where the Wardley map comes in. It looks a little bit scary, but it's really not. It's a value chain. So, these are the things most visible to your user, to your customer, to the business, whatever you decide your user can be, and these are the things that end up being invisible to your user. And the way it's structured is, your user has need or multiple needs and they are serviced by a number of capabilities and they branch down. This column or this section of the map is Genesis. So, these are capabilities or needs that are entirely unique and entirely special. They are completely out of the blue. They are brand new ideas. As we move along the evolution axis, these things start becoming custom-built. They start becoming things that lots of different companies might be producing, but they're all going to be quite different. When you buy them from company A, they are a very different supposition from when you buy them from company B, or you might be building them yourself. You'll see a lot of custom-built stuff. It's things that digital organizations decide they're going to build in-house. And one of the things this map is really useful for is allowing you to ask the question, should we be custom-building this, or should this be something that goes further along the axis? Is there a product? Is there something that companies are producing that we can just buy off the shelf and bring in? And there are differences between products. Cars are a great example of a product. An Audi, a BMW, a Volvo are all different, but they're all a car. They're all going to get you from A to B. They're going to be able to store things in the back. There are differences depending on your needs and your context, but all of them are similar. And then you get into commodities. And commodities is where the product has gone beyond these unique differences and it's into something that is entirely homogenous. Power is a great example of a commodity. It doesn't matter which company is supplying your electricity, it's all electricity. The differentiator for electricity is things like, is this a green corporation? And that is higher up here, closer to the user's needs. So, we've got a nice, simple example of this. We've got a business that sells cups of tea. The user wants a cup of tea and a cup of tea is the need and it's made up of these components. There's staff who will fulfill the order. There's the tea itself, which is a commodity. I think there's an argument that actually tees a product depending on if you're a bit of a tea snob or not. And then you've got the cups themselves which is solidly into products. We've got hot water, another commodity, just straight out of the tap and then into our nice custom-built kettle over here. And then the kettle uses the commodity of power, simple. And we've got one outlier over here because we're custom building our kettles. Everyone custom builds their kettles, right? You don't buy them from Milky Canton. You have a uniquely crafted kettle. No, just me, fine. The other thing you can do on these maps is you can overlay how the cost travels through. So the initial cost of the cup of tea, how that is divided up between deprecation on the cups, the cost of the tea themselves, the staff's wages, 20 cents goes into producing hot water, of which 10 cents of that is deprecation on the kettle. So you're spending 10 cents in order to have this custom kettle on every single 55 cent cup of tea you're producing. That's neither bad nor good, but it allows you to have a conversation. It allows you to have a conversation with finance, with marketing, with everyone else, say, is this something that brings people into our organisation? Are we a little tearoom in the middle of the Houga Coastan where people come in specifically because we've got these exciting homemade kettles bashed out of locally sourced copper, or are we selling cups of tea in a van by a football stadium and nobody cares how our hot water is produced? Because if nobody cares, we can move this thing all the way over here into a product or a commodity that we get super cheap and increase our profit margins, decrease our costs. But if we do that when we are depending on this to bring in customers, we may end up losing revenue because people stop coming in. Another example, anyone speak Elvish? No, good. At some point someone's gonna know and it's gonna ruin this. This is an architecture model. So I know we've got quite a few people from IT in here, so that's good. Because this being an architecture model, you guys can tell me off the bat which of these two things we should outsource to a third party and get done cheaply and which ones we should build in-house because it depends on our unique skills. No, no way to tell that. Should be, it's an architecture model. It should be able to easily tell us which one is not dependent. No, how about now? Still in Elvish, there's still no way to know what any of these things mean, but we've got this thing that lives in the custom build space and this thing that's a commodity. All of a sudden, even though I as a finance person or an HR person or any other discipline that doesn't know what these words mean because honestly, most IT architecture diagrams will look like Elvish to anyone that is not from IT. Can start to say, well, hang on a minute. This clearly looks like something where we would have to custom build it because it says custom build. It's difficult, it's complicated. But over here, it says it's a commodity. It says that companies are producing this exact thing all over. Can we not outsource that? Can we do it cheaper? Maybe, maybe you can't, but you can have that discussion. So these are what they actually mean. That's a GPS. You don't really wanna build your own GPS. And this is something called a world perception server. Who knows? You need to figure it out. The big plus for me of maps, of this kind of work, of setting it out in this way where space has meaning is you discuss the story, not the ability of the storyteller. And that's one of the big problems an awful lot of organizations face is very smooth, very charismatic, very clever people come in and sell you products and sell you ideas and sell you tools because they have a great ability to sell. When you start mapping it out and start saying, okay, great, you're telling me to build this thing, but how does that help? How does that reduce my cost? How does that help me deliver to my desirable end when I have to use some of my available means to do so? So let's look at that a little bit practically. I've come in. I've given a very specific, very easy goal of reduced costs. I'm going to look at a bit of automotive because that's something I've been working on in for 10 years. This is no particular client, but it's a bit of an amalgam of a few of them. Our customers need to get cars. We're automotive. It's what they do. They might want product information. They might want to just go out and test drive it, but at some point they're going to hit our website and they're going to buy and lease. They can configure. It's quite confusing, I realize. But the big thing is if I've been given a task to reduce costs, a big part of this being the website, the obvious thing I'm going to propose is let's do a new website. Let's make some templates for the front end. Let's get a new content management system that's really easy to use and let's put it on a more cloud-based infrastructure that'll save us money. It's something that everyone's heard. It's a lot of companies will have gone through that process of the way to reduce costs is to put in a new CMS. The problem with that is you get something like this. You need to change the interface, which is quite high in the stack, quite close to the user. You need to change the content management tool itself. You need to change the hosting. All of a sudden, you're engaging with an awful lot of stakeholders with the organization, some of whom are going to have a lot of inertia to making this change, some of whom are just not going to agree with you. You're battling on multiple levels in multiple areas. The other thing that's helped highlight is you're actually shifting. One of the key custom build things, one of the things that is close to your user, it's one of the closest points to your user, you're shifting from being a custom area where you are creating a unique experience and you're saying, we're going to make that a commodity, we're going to make that something that looks like everyone else's. That might be fine. If your only goal is reducing costs, that's fine. You are going to reduce costs, but you can at least have the conversation and go, hang on a minute. Maybe we can reduce costs another way, maybe we can do it in a way that's not going to impact quite so severely. So one of the proposals is you actually dial it down and say, well, fine. Let's look right at the bottom of the stack. The thing furthest away from our customer, the thing they're going to care about least and instead of having our own custom racks in a service center somewhere, we're going to shift that off and we're going to put it on something like Netlify. We're going to put the entire thing on a serverless infrastructure and just forget about it. And that will shift us a huge distance. It'll save us a lot of money, but it's also right down the stack. We're going to assume we can just replatform our current CMS. Doesn't affect anything up here. The customer will never know. I am yet to find a customer who has ever cared about which platform their car company's hosted on, but it allows you to build it in this particular way and it allows you then to work up. So once you've got this done, you've started to put pressure on the content management system. You can start moving that across if you want to, to more of a commodity, to something that's less built. And you've also freed up a lot of resources down here who have been maintaining the hosting, who have got a lot of useful skills, but they've been kind of wasted maintaining a website servers that they don't need, who can now start doing some clever things closer up to where your customer actually is. So, final thoughts. I actually have no idea how I'm doing on time. Maybe a bit early. So, final thoughts. All models are wrong, but some are useful. Wadley mapping is not a perfect map. It is not a perfect example of what the organization looks like, what the environment looks like, because the only way for that to be true is for the map to be a one-to-one replica. The only perfect map of France is France itself, but that's not really useful. Maps like these are really, really helpful as a way of building discussions. The fact that you can sit down with someone and in the course of a 20-minute thing, get them to understand that there is this weird situation with this company selling cups of tea that they're building their own kettles and you can ask the question, should you be? The fact you can look at an automotive map and go, this is gonna be a really complicated project that may have effects we were not anticipating. Whilst it may reduce cost, it may impact our actual engagement level with our customer because you are way up the stack making changes is a really, really useful thing to do. And the other thing that's allowing is it democratizes strategy. It brings the opportunity for people who are not in the loop, who are not in the management team, who are not the CEO, to start asking valuable questions about the desirable end you're trying to achieve and if it's the appropriate use of the resources you have available. Because ultimately, nobody in the organization individually has a perfect map of the organization. But the more information we get, the more we can share this kind of detail, the more those questions come up before it's too late and that's the heart of mapping, it's the heart of agile, it's finding things out as early as possible so you can pivot and make better decisions. Thank you very much.