Wardley Mapping Canvas

Wardley Mapping Canvas

A Wardley Mapping Canvas is a representation of the landscape in which a business operates. It consists of a value chain (activities needed to fulfill user needs) graphed against evolution (how individual activities change over time under supply and demand competition).

According to Miro, a Wardley Mapping Canvas represents the situational awareness and shared assumptions being made about a context and hints at what strategic options are available.

To Simon Wardley, the technique’s inventor, strategy can be described using Sun Tzu’s Five Factors: purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, and leadership. In that model, a wise leader has a moral imperative (a what and a why), grasps the terrain (has a map), anticipates the patterns of the forces acting on the environment, trains the organization in universally useful principles and makes shrewd decisions that lead to victory.

For the most part, you can use the Wardely Mapping Canvas as a way to quickly validate solutions and avoid costly mistakes – to identify what to build, buy and outsource. A map minimizes the chance that you’ll miss something important, especially in the face of imperfect information. Every step of the mapping process reveals new insights that enable you to make better decisions.

As Ben Misoir explains in the Miro site, Wardley Mapping reliably diminishes project risk, and anyone responsible for outcomes of any significance will find it valuable to learn.

Checkout other business canvases in our Canvas Database