 The next speaker I think needs very little introduction. Simon Wardley is a passionate thinker, advocate, writer. He is a brilliant technologist as well. Please welcome to the stage Simon Wardley. Wow. Thank you, sir. Everybody knows you. Thank you ever so much. Crossing the river by feeling the stones. I'm going to talk about a dreaded word, that word being strategy. And it's a dreaded word because every time I say it, I always feel that these people are going to turn up, you know, with their agile, all the things type approach or whatever is popular for today. How many of you in the audience know the mapping stuff that I do? Anybody? A couple. Okay. So I'm going to talk about a strategy from my own personal experience. I used to be CEO of an online photo service called Fatango. A couple of million users, that sort of thing. You know, reasonably big for 2005. This was quite some time ago. Now, we had all the sorts of typical things that a tech company would have. We had SWOT diagrams and business models, et cetera. But we had one enormous weakness. We had a fake CEO, which was me. So rather than being the chess playing master, I didn't know what I was doing. It was all alchemy. It was all gut feel. It was all whatever is popular in the HBR. That's the Harvard business review. So how many of you from a development background? How many of you feel that you're from a development background that your business is full of chess playing masters? Right. How many of you from a business background? How many of you feel that your business is full of chess playing masters? Oh, one. We've got, well, the rest of us are realists, at least. So I was very much feeling like I was the fake CEO. We had our strategy documents, our strategy's customer focus. We will lead an innovative effort of the market through our use of agile techniques and open source. I pretty much pinched it from another company because that's as good as I was at the game. And I started to notice that other companies had the same sort of strategy documents as well. So I started going around recording what I call business level abstractions of a healthy strategy, or BLAS for sure. These are the sort of common words that people say. And here they are. This is a more modern version. Digital business, big data, disruptive, innovative, collaborative, ecosystem, open source, competitive advantage, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. And then I created a BLAR template. Our strategy is BLAR. We will lead a BLAR effort of the market through our use of BLAR and BLAR to build a BLAR. And then I combined the BLAR and BLAR template and auto-generated 64 different strategies. I thought I'd go through these. Number one, our strategy is customer focus. We will lead a disruptive effort of the market through our use of innovative social media. And I can barely say the words. Strategy two, our strategy is innovative digital business. Well, I sent them around. I've got 400 responses back of three basic types. This is more or less the exact wording from our business plan. I've seen two of these used already. And lastly, and probably my favorite, is are you for hire? Of course, it's all random gibberish. So a friend of mine has actually taken this, put this online. This is strategy as a service, by the way. So if you ever need a strategy, you don't hire consultants. Just type in the URL and it will automatically create you one. This is one I just copied from the screenshot this morning. And if you don't like it, just press refresh. And it's as easy as that. So, of course, being a fake CEO, not knowing what I was doing, I was sort of worried someone was going to find out. So I started to think about, well, I better actually try and understand what strategy is about. So I went back to Sun Tzu. Anybody know what he wrote? Super. So Sun Tzu said five factors matter in competition. One, purpose, moral imperative. Two, understand your landscape, the environment you're competing in. Three, understand the climatic patterns, how it's changing. Four, understand doctrine. And then finally, you add in sort of the, you add the leadership bit, the sort of context specific gameplay. Now there's another person, John Boyd, created, anybody know what he created? Uda Loops. Fantastic. US Air Force pilot. And so if we put that in on this cycle, we've got the game. Whether I'm playing a game of chess or building the best tea shop in Ashford, which is near where I live. So you have your purpose. The next thing you need to do is observe the environment. So that's landscape and climate. Then you need to orientate yourself around it. That's doctrine. And finally, you need to decide. That's the leadership bit. And then you act. So you've got this nice cycle. And then people say to me, well, it's all about the importance of Y. Well, that's true, but there's two Ys. There's the Y of purpose, such as I want to be the best tea shop in Ashford or I want to win this game of chess. And then there's the Y of movement. As in, why should I move this piece over that piece? Okay. So let's go back to Fatanga. I put it in terms of that cycle. We had a purpose. We wanted to be an online photo service and also all these other things we wanted to do. It was a bit messy. Then I came to landscape. Right. How do we observe our environment? Is it important? Well, I came across a bunch of documents talking about something called situational awareness. So I knew it was somehow important, but I wasn't quite sure why. And I'm going to give you three examples of why situational awareness matters. Vikings, chess, and thermistor, please. So Vikings. This is how Vikings used to navigate. From home and head due west towards half and you will have sailed north. They use stories. And then they turned it into maps. Now, maps are actually quite effective way of navigation. You know this yourself. Every time someone asks you directions somewhere, if they've got a map, you point out and they go. If they don't, you give them a story. Up the road, turn left, turn right, and off they go. And then you're left with that moment. Did I send them in the right direction? Are they sort of somewhere lost? But quick question. What would you use to navigate? Visual map or a verbal story? Sorry? Super. What do you think we use in business? Stories. Super. Right. Excellent. So chess world. I want you to imagine you play chess. In a world, everybody plays chess, but no one's ever seen a chess board. All you've ever seen are these characters on a screen. And you play the game very simply. You press a button. Your opponent counters. You press, they counter. You press, and it goes on and on until somebody wins or it's a draw. Now, what will happen is people will take these sequences and put them into their big data systems and discover magic secrets of success. And they'll publish this in things like HBR. Things like how earlobes can signify leadership potential. I kid you not. For analogy for management, it's depressing. But one day you'll play a game of chess against someone who will see something truly magical, the board. And so you will move and they will counter, and you will move and they will counter, and you will have lost. And you'll be, what the fiddlesticks happen there? First thing you're going to do is copy their sequence and you will still lose. Then you'll start saying, well, maybe it's the speed at which they press the button and you'll still lose. Then you'll start saying it's cultural. Maybe they're a happy sort of person and you'll still lose. And the point is you exist in a low-level situational awareness environment. They exist in a high, so it's very context-specific. So what would you use to learn? Secrets of success or context-specific gameplay? Context-specific gameplay. Excellent. What would we use to learn in business? Secrets of success. Fabulous. Right. So last one is Themistocles. Ancient politician Greek general had a problem. Persians were invading, had options, decided to block off the Persians in the Straits of Artemisium, forced them along the coastal road into Thermopylae. It's an hour pass. We're about 4,000 Greeks and 300 Spartans could fight against 140,000-odd Persians. Now, I want you to imagine you're Athenian. You're part of that Greek army. It's the eve of battle. Themistocles is there giving you purpose, moral imperative. We've got to stop the Persians. And then he says, I don't understand the landscape. I don't understand the environment but have no fear, I've created a SWAT diagram. Strength to well-trained Spartan army, high level of motivation, not to become a Persian slave. Weaknesses, the fores might stop the Spartans turning up a truckload of Persians are turning up. Opportunities. Get rid of the Persians. Get rid of the Spartans. We're Athenian. We actually hate the Spartans. And the threats of the Persians get rid of us and the Oracle says a really dodgy film. Might be reduced a few thousand years later. So what would you use to communicate and determine strategy and battle? Position and movement as described by a map or a magic framework? Excellent. What do we use in business? Very framework. Super. Right. So when we come back to chess play and alchemy, if we look at navigation, look at learning, look at strategy, then chess is all visual. It's context specific. It's all about position and movement. It's what we call a high level situational awareness environment. Same with the military. Same with what doesn't matter what game you're playing. Go, for example. But on the other side, it's all about alchemy, storytelling, secrets of success, magic frameworks. It's a low level situational awareness environment and being a fake CEO, that's where I was. And of course I wanted to be over that side. What do you think most businesses are? Good. So what's the difference? The difference between the two environments is very simple. It's a map. That's it. Maps have very special characteristics. They're visual, context specific. They have position of pieces relative to an anchor. In this case, the anchor is a compass. You have the ability to see movement, which enables you to learn, and you have components. That's all. Now, what I had were things like these, network diagrams, business process diagrams. These are all network topology. It's all sort of like a superset, but it lacks the characteristics of a map. It has no navigational characteristics, and therefore it's not useful for learning. So what I wanted to do was turn this into a map. So I started off, I needed an anchor. So I started with user needs at the very top. Then I needed position. So I created a value chain, so a chain of components relative to that user need. So at the top were the things the users wanted, at the bottom were the things we needed to do, but they didn't really, weren't really visible to the user. Things like power and data centers. Now, I still lack movement, so it's not a map. Fortunately, there's a standard process by which things evolve. Genesis, custom-built product commodity, so I could use that and turn this into a map. And that was the first map I produced in 2005. Okay. So now I understand the landscape. I can start to learn about climactic patterns. So these are the rules that influence the game. Things like everything evolves. Maps aren't static. The characteristics change. They start on the left in the uncharted space, poorly understood chaotic. Doesn't matter what it is, money computing. Over time, they become industrialized. Ordered, standard, stable, dull. Also, another pattern is we have inertia created by past success. We get very good at things, and so we don't like this idea of change. There are 27 common economic patterns. And you can use this to start to anticipate change. So, took a map. We know everything's evolving. Compute platform will become a utility. We know we're going to have inertia. We know it's going to create higher order systems that there's a new line of the future. And we can use that and talk between IT and finance and operations and discuss about how that environment is changing. So once you do that, we get into doctrine. These are the universally applicable principles regardless of context. Stuff that works everywhere. There's 40 of them. Things like focus on user needs. Remove duplication. Don't rebuild the same thing over and over. So in government, you have immigration, borders, and police, and we have different maps. We can discover we're doing the same thing. The level of duplication in organizations is horrendous. I always think governments, you know, people say government's bad. Government is nowhere near as bad as private sector. I mean, the worst example I found in government is 100, 118 workflow systems all doing the same thing. The worst example in confirmed example in the private sector is a bank has a thousand risk management systems. We're sitting there going, we can't innovate. Well, I'm not surprised. Okay. So the next thing you do with maps is you start to discover you need multiple practices. So things like the way you treat an industrialized component, outsource it, maybe use Six Sigma. Use off-the-shelf products or lean for that sort of stuff in the middle when you're learning about products. Use agile techniques on the far left-hand side. Use multiple techniques. And then you start breaking organizations into small teams, cell-based structures, putting people who have similar skill sets together. And then you start to discover you don't have one culture in an organization. You need multiple. You need pioneers who are good at discovering the new. But what they create is barely usable. Then you have set lists. You can take that and turn it into something useful. And then you have town planners who are fabulous, brilliant people at industrializing. And so you create structures which are only not only cell-based but use multiple cultures and can adapt to change. By the way, GCHQ very kindly have open sourced a document called Boiling Frogs, which talks about how to actually build such structures and cope with constant change. So we now understand our environment. We're starting to learn climactic patterns. We're learning doctrine. Now we get on to the leadership bit, the wire for movement. So this is all about context-specific forms of gameplay. So you have a map. We can anticipate what's going to change. We can talk between IT and finance and business and operations. It's not, it's always amusing that people, that often you get these sort of communication errors between, say, IT and finance. And somebody always thinks, well, in finance, you've got to learn to be a technologist. Or in IT, you've got to learn finance. You've got to have double-deep employees in order to communicate. That's a bit like a marine calling in air support and being told, do you know how to fly a jet plane? No. Well, you can't have air support then. I mean, we use maps because we can communicate with maps. So we can anticipate the change. We now can determine where we could attack. We could wait until somebody else builds a utility environment, build something novel and new on top of it. Or we could be the first mover, build a platform or... It also teaches us where not to attack. Don't focus on the stuff which is changing, which is going to become legacy. It's going to disappear. And once you can see multiple points of attack, then it's a question of how do you manipulate the market to your favor? And things like open source are incredibly powerful approaches for driving things to a more industrialized state. You can slow it down with fear, uncertainty and doubt. There's about 67 different ways of manipulating the market. So in our case, what we decided to do was build the first ever platform as a service. It was code execution environment, utility-based, basically charged on JavaScript operations, network and storage, with functional billing, totally serverless, and we were going to use an open approach to create a marketplace of multiple providers. We had an ecosystem approach, so we could mine metadata to identify new patterns. And then we were guessing that somebody was going to come out with a utility infrastructure environment. We actually had our own. So we could either use that or open source our own technology. That was the plan 2005. The next step is act, which is what we did. We launched Zimki, the world's first ever JavaScript front and back end serverless environment. And actually there's somebody in the audience who still has a Zimki T-shirt. Amazing. And it grew like hotcakes and we were like, wow, fantastic. We were the only tech company in Old Street in London at the time, but we were like, thought we were the center of the world. And then Amazon launched, brilliant. And then the parent company got some consultants in. And they said the three things that we were doing, 3D printing mobile phones as cameras and cloud computing, were not the future. The future was 3D television. So we shut it all down and spend billions on 3D TV. So I left and joined Ubuntu in 2008. We mapped out the environment, worked out where we could attack, and we used the same technique taking us from a small part of the operating system to about 70% of all cloud in 18 months. After that, I started working with various parts of government, wrote something called the better for less paper. Anyway, future. I want to talk about the future, but I only have 20 minutes and I'm just about to run out. So what I'm doing is a session, unconference session at 3.20. I'm going to talk about topographical intelligence in business. I'm going to talk about three particular areas. Why open source by default is not a good idea. How Trump will make America great again, or maybe not. And why DevOps is tomorrow's legacy. So we're going to go through serverless. But quick summary, strategy is a cycle. It's an iterative process. It's a process by which you have to act, you have to take steps, and you have to learn about the environment. And it's really important to understand that environment. That's why techniques like mapping are useful. So anyway, having a purpose and direction, taking small steps, understanding your environment, this is what crossing the river by feeling the stones is all about. And thank you. Now before I go, I teach, bizarrely enough, I now teach at business schools. I'm teaching MBAs how to map. It's the bizarre world I'm in now. As well as governments and large corporations. And I put up a tweet saying maybe I should do a mapping camp in London. Anybody interesting? Thinking I'd get one or two responses. Within two hours, 70 volunteers, they'd already got a building, they put up a website, and they've got sponsors. And so we've got an entire conference going on in London. I just want to say I'm so grateful for all the support and help I get from everyone. It's really very much appreciated. It's on the 5th of October in London. And the best thing is two groups have already said, right, we're doing one in Sydney, and another group said they're going to do in Portland as well. So hopefully it'll help Portland. Hopefully it will help it spread. All the mapping stuff, by the way, is Creative Commons. I made it Creative Commons, gosh, 10, 11 years ago. So please feel free to help yourself. Thank you.