Without a board there’s no way to tell what move to make next so you’re blindly making moves in hopes that they lead to checkmate. You take turns making moves like in traditional chess, but there’s no board so you simply record sequences of moves.Ī game might look like this: Pawn (white), Pawn (black), Pawn (w), Knight (b)…etc. You still have six pieces (a pawn, a rook, a knight, a bishop, a queen and a king) as does your opponent. Now imagine a chess game that has no board. At any point in time, you can see the position of the pieces on the board and determine what move to make next.Ī chess grandmaster can show up midway through the game, take one quick look at the board and instantly know what the next best move is. It’s context specific to the game you’re playing. Source Simon Wardley - Wardley Maps Book)Ī chess board is an example of a map. There are six core elements for any map: visual representation, context specific, positionof componentsrelative to some form of anchorand movementof those components. The next idea in the book is that maps are the best way to improve situational awareness and dictate strategic gameplays in business. The importance of maps in situational awareness This mental model will often suggest what moves you make next based on your objective.įor example, have you ever been in a situation where you were fully in the zone? When you could see what was happening with crystal clarity and anticipate others’ moves before they were made? This is known as "fingertip feel" and is a term used by John Boyd who was part of the inspiration for Wardley Maps. The quality of that mental model determines how close you are to being right about the situation and the quality of decisions you make in relation to that situation will be. Here’s a somewhat formal definition: Situational awareness is the perception of the elements of a situation, the comprehension of their meaning and their projection into the future.Īdapted from "Designing for Situational Awareness" by Mica EndselyĪll that means is that when you’re in a situation, you instinctively form a mental model of the situation based on what you perceive and what you can map to patterns you’ve seen before, a sort of “theory” of the situation that allows you to predict how it will unfold into the near future. So what is situational awareness? It’s a well known concept in military circles but not very well known elsewhere. Without situational awareness, your strategy devolves to useless superlatives like “data driven synergies.” If there is a core theme spanning the book, it’s the idea that the more you improve your situational awareness, the better your strategy gets. Gameplay: Strategy is a continuous cycle of moves not a linear plan.Situational Awarness: Better situational awareness leads to better strategy.After reading a few chapters of Wardley’s book and watching him speak, it finally clicked into place many of the loose strands and allowed me to synthesize the concept of strategy into two foundational principles that apply regardless of the domain being considered. I had been reading about business strategy for over a decade but I had never seen the big picture. He later used the same techniques to take Ubuntu from an unknown Linux distribution to the most widely used. The book charts his journey from a confused CEO to one who got really close to building the first cloud computing company before AWS, only to be thwarted by his board. In 2004, Wardley was the CEO of an online photo service business called Fotango. Wouldn’t it be cool if running an organization was more like this? That’s how I felt when first I heard about Simon Wardley’s blandley-titled Wardley Mapping book and watched a few presentations by the author on YouTube (He’s hilarious btw) The book is really long but it’s filled with examples and personal anecdotes from Wardely’s foray into business strategy. As you play, you might switch the strategy from playing defense to all out attacking to vying for position. When you’re playing a game, like chess for example, you always have an objective – to capture the opponent’s king – but the strategy is not a fixed plan because it depends on what your opponent is doing, your position on the board, the pieces you have in play, etc. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the word strategy? If you’re like most people you’ll come up with a version of “a plan to achieve a desired end.” If you look into the origin of the word however, it stems from stratagem which is a “plan or scheme to outwit an opponent” which I personally find more satisfying.
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