The ideal #wardleymapping introduction ending 🍾

This is the third post in the series. You can find the first article here and the second here. They will guide you through a low-risk way of introducing #wardleymapping to your team without risking too much social capital.

If everything worked as expected, your team learned to differentiate between unpredictable and predictable components, and is in the middle of a heated discussion about how things should work.

Your role is to remind everyone what they already know - nobody knows the future; we can only look in a particular direction and start our journey step-by-step.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what that direction is as it is always context-specific. However, here is a list of plausible directions that I have seen defined in the past:

• instrument current projects or analyse past ones to see where the time has been really spent

• get rid of manual tasks

• expose uncertainty to your stakeholders ("this is stuff we know, this is stuff we do not know, this is how we are going to learn, and this is how much time/money we need")

• focus on uncertain things and make them more predictable through experimentation and learning

• wrap uncertainty in a predictable process

• outsource uncertainty through time&materials contracts

• replace solution custom-building with configurability

• simplify value chains

• stop custom-building internal solutions if products are available

• ... (I am happy to include your observation here, drop me a line on twitter)

Depending on your team setup, you may identify a dozen of potential actions, or more.

The key is to keep in mind two selection criteria:

• #wardleymapping value must materialise as soon as possible - focus on your next, most significant project

• nobody will stick their neck for #wardleymapping - accept only those initiatives that can fail without significant consequences.

I do not know if this is a good practice yet, but I happen to end up with a few (2-3) independent actions that can be executed in parallel. If you seek an inspiration on how to manage those actions with #wardleymapping, watch my interview with Marcus Guest.

This is it: #wardleymapping dressed as a safe-to-fail proposal of doing things differently.

Thank you for getting to this point, I really, really appreciate it.

And, if you do not mind, I have an ask - if this approach worked for you (or did not), tell me about in a call or via twitter!

Fruitful Mapping in 2022!