Using Scenarios and Wardley Maps to Gain Strategic Awareness
As shown in the image a great strategy has five components:
- Vision
- Capabilities
- Resources
- A Plan
- Strategic Awareness
Most people are aware of the first four of these components but good strategic awareness is uncommon. If you do not have goood strategic awareness then you can be fantastic at the other four components and achieve exactly what you set out to achieve. If you are lucky your vision will match the strategic landscape you are operating in and you will be successful. If you do not have good strategic awareness and you are lucky enough to have competitors who don’t either you can still be successful. If you find yourself operating in an environment where others have better strategic awareness than you then you can end up in a world of trouble even if you are great at execution. As Peter Drucker once said:
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
We can help you embed the capacity for strategic awareness inside your organisation. The question you need to ask yourself is do you want to keep relying on being lucky or do you want to gain the capacity to not have to be lucky?
We offer you a free session focused on an issue of your choosing to demonstrate how we can help you. After that you choose from one of service options listed below.
Our Services
Wardley Mapping Foresight Coaching
We work with you to train your people in value chain mapping by mapping your current strategic landscape (current state in the image).
Once that level of competency is achieved, we coach your people through the process of creating new strategy by either:
- Creating future state maps by looking at how various components of the value chain may evolve.
OR
- Mapping your competitors and creating alternative competitive strategies.
Using this approach embeds the capacity inside your organisation to think about strategy in a different way by starting with strategic awareness of the present and possible strategic landscapes of the future.
Wardley Mapping Foresight Coaching plus Scenario Creation and Training
As shown in the video below where Paul presented to a European mapping conference we coach your though the process of creating scenarios and Wardley Maps to examine your strategy and create signposts that you can monitor for future change in order to adjust strategy as the future emerges.
This is an iterative process where we:
- Work with you to create scenarios looking at the challenges that you face.
- We work with you to map those scenarios in Wardley Maps.
- We revise the scenarios based on looking at evolution on the Wardley Maps.
- We use the scenarios and the maps to create a set of signposts for you to scan to identify change that is impactful on you as an organisation.
So at the end of the process, you will have:
- Created the capacity to create scenarios and Wardley Maps of your own.
- Gained greater strategic awareness of the challenges that you face.
- Created a formal scanning and reporting process on the signposts that matter to you.