What I learned from Simon Wardley’s Book (Part 1)

I recently finished reading Simon Wardley’s book, which describes a novel mapping technique that he invented. As it was pretty dense and took me a long time to get through, I’m going to describe what I got out of it, both as a way to jog my memory and to hopefully offer value to others.

The first question Wardley answers is, Why do you need maps in the first place? Simon Wardley created his first map when he was an executive at Fotango, a photo sharing startup that had been acquired by Canon and was at that time running as an independent a division. Wardley wasn’t entirely sure what to focus on next from a strategic perspective, and realized that he didn’t even have a sound way to evaluate strategy proposals. However, he also happened to be reading The Art of War at the time, and took a bit of inspiration from history.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu describes five different factors that are important for winning a war: Purpose, Landscape, Climate, Doctrine, and Leadership. Purpose is what you are doing and why. Landscape is the description of the environment you are operating in. Climate is the forces that act on the environment, such as seasons and the rules of war. Doctrine is the training of your forces, and the standard way of operating. Finally, Leadership is describes the strategy that leaders choose.

Consider the chess board

When he thought about landscape, Wardley considered how we visualize the landscape through a map. Whether…