In my MBA program, we were taught two ends of business:
- Being an effective operator of business machinery that isalready in motion by having some decent mental model of how a business works
- Putting somewhat credible frameworks around an exciting new product/service/venture/whatever, with things like *finance* and *cap tables* by telling a great story around whatever it was we’d set out to do.
Then, when we were called to answer “what is your strategy?”, we’d be really good at explaining all of the strengths of our pitch on the fly.
But strategy is a difficult thing, as it turns out. We didn’t get much better in real-life practice. The vast majority of strategic planning that I’ve run across — on the product or program level especially — is a continuation of the theme of building narratives.
If we’d been dreaming up the Allied invasion of Normandy back in my MBA, or in most planning sessions since then, we’d have made a really great pitch deck, describing our strategy in these sort of terms:
The problem is, in between these two things is a massive gap. We’re going directly from the Mission to the Action and not pausing to really figure out if our actions were the right ones out of all of the possible paths.
The Allies didn’t first get excited on the idea of invading Normandy in late spring, then create a strong case for it, and pick the best pitch from their generals. They decided to invade Normandy because they understood their landscape, the resources, the climate, the position of the enemy on the field, and movement of people and things across time. They used things like air superiority, knowledge of the port at Cherbourg, and prior experience with beach landings in Italy and the Pacific, to come to the conclusion that invading Normandy was their best option.
In business, we frame some goals that get us closer to our mission, take disconnected frameworks like SWOT, PESTLE, VRINE, and all sorts of business intelligence tools (oh but I do enjoy writing a good CTE with SQL!), try to find common themes among the lists we’ve jotted down, and then create a narrative that charts a plausible path through.
The Allies, on the other hand, oriented against the landscape, saw the position of resources and enemies, the movement happening in the field, saw opportunities, and then set goals, allocated resources against them, and took action.
The result in business is the “pivot”, or other behaviors like:
- adding or dropping products in a hurry, with cost and quality overruns
- managing to short term metrics in order to keep the narratives alive, or
- trying to re-frame the narrative against new realities
It’s frequently exhausting.
Then, a few years ago, I came across a British strategist named Simon Wardley who introduced an eponymous mapping technique for business that blew my mind. Suddenly, there was a framework that spoke the language of strategy and allowed us to tie our analysis together in a coherent way, visualize our landscape, and spot opportunities — as well as traps. One of the brilliant things about it is that it focuses the team on the customer, laser-focusing on solving the customer needs not through features, but through understanding the jobs that everyone in the value chain is trying to do.
Since then, the teams I’ve worked with have used mapping to completely re-shape our strategies. Most recently, did a deep dive mapping process in our own business and our industry, and took three months to completely redesign our corporate strategy and chart a 3-yr roadmap to significantly de-risk our core business while scaling new revenue by multiples. We’ve also used mapping to describe product features and orient the business language around the user needs, which helps align all of our teams against a common understanding of our mission and our path to accomplishing it.
In my next post I’ll go into some mapping examples applied first to development strategy, then to feature management, and a few other fun things.
In the meantime, I highly recommend watching Simon Wardley present on mapping in business in one of the excellent videos below.
Short version:
Long version:
