Most strategy work produces diagrams. Org charts, roadmaps, capability matrices, SWOT grids. They look authoritative. They get presented in slide decks. They are almost never used to make decisions.

The reason is not that the diagrams are wrong. It’s that they don’t answer the question a strategist actually needs answered:

Where are we? And what can we do from here?

That’s what a map is for.

Maps versus diagrams

A diagram represents structure. A map represents position.

An org chart is a diagram — it shows relationships between roles. It doesn’t tell you where the organization sits in its competitive environment, which capabilities are maturing, or which ones are about to be commoditized by someone else.

A map has two things a diagram lacks: a consistent orientation and a shared understanding of what the axes mean.

On a geographic map, north is always north. Distance is always distance. Two people reading the same map will reach the same conclusions about how far apart two cities are and which roads connect them.

Most strategy diagrams don’t work this way. The x-axis means whatever the person who made it decided it means. The y-axis means something else. Two people reading the same slide reach different conclusions because the frame of reference is personal, not shared.

Simon Wardley solved this by defining axes that are grounded in how value actually evolves. Wardley spent years as a CEO trying to make sense of his own industry — not with frameworks imported from business school, but by thinking carefully about what actually changes and what doesn’t. The result is a method that respects how messy the real world is while still giving you somewhere to stand.

The two axes

A Wardley Map has two axes.

The vertical axis is value chain: what needs to exist for something else to exist. Users at the top. The components that serve them below. The components that serve those components below that. Visibility decreases as you move down — users see the top, not the infrastructure underneath.

The horizontal axis is evolution: how mature a component is. On the left: genesis. Something new, poorly understood, expensive, unreliable. On the right: commodity. Something so well understood and widely available that you don’t think about it — like electricity or internet bandwidth.

In between: custom-built, then product. Everything moves left to right over time, driven by competition and supply. Nothing moves right to left.

That directionality is what makes it a map, not a diagram. You can point at anything on it and say: this is where we are, and this is the direction things move.

Situational awareness

Sun Tzu wrote that strategy without situational awareness is dangerous. You need to know the terrain before you decide how to cross it.

Most organizations lack situational awareness about their own components. They know what they do. They don’t know where each piece of what they do sits on the evolution curve — and therefore don’t know which pieces are about to change beneath them.

A component that’s currently custom-built in your organization may already be a product somewhere else. That means a competitor can buy what you’re building, at lower cost and higher reliability, and redirect their effort to something upstream.

A component that’s moving toward commodity in your industry is not where you want to build competitive differentiation. That’s like investing heavily in managing your own electricity generation when the grid is available.

Situational awareness lets you see these dynamics before they hit you. A map makes them visible.

Gameplay

Wardley’s most useful contribution may not be the map itself but what he calls gameplay — a set of named patterns that describe how markets and organizations behave at different stages of evolution.

If a component is in genesis, certain moves are available. If it’s becoming commodity, different moves are available. The map tells you which zone you’re in. The gameplay patterns tell you what to do about it.

Some examples:

Exploit the transition. When a component moves from custom to product, the organization that commoditizes it first can often dominate the market for what comes next.

Componentize. Break a large custom system into smaller pieces. The pieces can evolve independently. Some become commodity. Others remain differentiated.

Land and expand. Enter a market at the commodity layer where friction is low, then climb the value chain.

Eat your own tail. Proactively commoditize your own product before someone else does, to free resources for the next layer up.

These aren’t prescriptions. They’re options. The map tells you which options exist from where you stand.

Value streams

A Wardley Map is, at its foundation, a value stream.

Every chain of components on the map traces a path from user need down through what’s required to meet it. That path is the value stream: the sequence of work and capability that produces value for someone.

Value stream thinking has a long lineage in manufacturing and lean operations. Wardley’s contribution is to add evolution — to ask not just “what’s in the stream?” but “where is each element in its maturity, and how will that change?”

A value stream map alone shows you the flow. A Wardley Map shows you the flow and the terrain.

A tradition of visual knowledge

Wardley mapping belongs to a broader tradition of thinking through drawing.

Tony Buzan developed mind maps in the 1960s as a way of externalizing associative thought — radial, nonlinear, centered on a concept. Mind maps are excellent for brainstorming and individual note-taking. They don’t encode position or direction.

IHMC’s CmapTools brought concept mapping into research and education — a more rigorous form where nodes are concepts, edges are labeled relationships, and the structure reflects how ideas connect. CmapTools has been used for everything from knowledge elicitation in expert systems to curriculum design in classrooms. It’s a genuine tool for collaborative sense-making.

Integrated Value Networking (IVN), developed by Basil White, Martin, and our own work at Civic Studio, extends this into organizational modeling — mapping how value flows between people, roles, and systems, with attention to reciprocal relationships and network dynamics that simple hierarchies miss. Where an org chart shows reporting lines, an IVN shows value exchange. Where a process diagram shows sequence, an IVN shows interdependence.

Wardley mapping shares this lineage. It’s a tool for making something invisible — the strategic landscape — visible enough to reason about together.

The common thread: drawing changes thinking. Externalizing a model into a shared visual space creates a reference that a room full of people can argue about, refine, and use. A slide describes. A map enables navigation.

Wardley.app

We built Wardley.app to make this practical.

The standard tool for Wardley mapping has been an online editor with a text-based DSL — you write a map in a notation language and it renders. That’s powerful for people who are already fluent. It’s a barrier for people who are new.

Wardley.app offers a visual-first interface: drag to position, click to connect, see the evolution axis enforced by the grid. It also exposes an API so maps can be programmatically created, updated, and queried — which matters when you want to keep a map current as your organization evolves, not just produce a one-time artifact.

We’ve used it to map the Civic Studio product ecosystem — where each product sits on the evolution curve, how the products relate to public sector IT components, and where the gaps are. That map (ID 13 on Wardley.app) overlays directly onto a reference map of public sector customer experience IT, so you can see which components Civic Studio products address and which are still unaddressed.

A map you can update is a different thing than a map you produce once and file. The point of situational awareness is that the situation changes. The map has to be able to change with it.

How to start

You don’t need Wardley.app or any tool to try this. You need a whiteboard and one question: what do our users need, and what has to exist for us to provide it?

Draw the answer top to bottom — user need at the top, components below. Then, for each component, ask: how mature is this? Is it something we built ourselves because nothing like it existed? Or is it available off the shelf? Or is it so standard it barely registers as a choice?

Plot that left to right.

Now look at what you have. Where are you investing in custom components that are already becoming products somewhere else? Where are you treating commodity components as if they’re differentiating? Where is the next layer of value that you could be moving toward if the current layer wasn’t consuming all your attention?

That’s situational awareness. That’s the beginning of gameplay.

Wardley.app is available at wardley.app. The /wardley skill in Claude Code can read, create, and update maps via the API.

Wardley Mapping: Situational Awareness and Gameplay