Deck created from multiple Simon Wardley videos (by Robert Grace)

1. Simon Wardley

2. Overview
• Science Background
• Worked in Management Consulting – equates it to House of
Lies; says he is in recovery
• CEO of an online photo-printing service
• Someone asked him to look at a strategy document and he
did
• And said “it looks fine to me”
• He asked someone to look at his strategy document, and
they did
• And said “it looks fine to me”
• Which sort of echoed in his head

3. The Sound of Understanding
• He went on to look at several strategy documents and realised they all contained the
following
• Innovative
• Efficient
• Customer-centric
• Web 2.0
• And other buzz-words fashionable at Wharton/HBS/LSE/ENSEAD/etc.
• These common “memes” were repeated in the strategy documents of other
companies; he knew this as he was pretty sure he had copied them.
• He heard thought leaders at various conferences and read analyst reports that
proclaimed these same lines over and over as the new truth.
• Well, at least we were following the herd – 67% of CEOS say that . . .
• Someone must have started these memes and how did they know if they were right?

4. The Art of War
• He read The Art of War by Sun Tzu (544-496 BC) Many entrepreneurs and
corporate executives have turned to it for inspiration and advice on how
to succeed in competitive business situations.
Sun Tzu’s five factors are: -
Purpose
Your moral imperative;
the scope of
• What you are doing
• Why you are doing it.
• The reasons others
follow you.
Landscape
A description of the
environment you
compete in, including
• Position of troops
• Features of the
landscape
• Obstacles in your way.
Climate
Forces that act upon the
environment
• Patterns of the seasons
• Rules of the game.
These
• Impact the landscape
• You don’t get to
choose them
• You can discover them.
• Include your
competitors’ actions.
Doctrine
Training your forces
Standard ways of
operating
Techniques almost always
applied.
These are
• Universal principles
• A set of beliefs that
appear to work
regardless of the
landscape faced.
Leadership
About the strategy you
choose when considering
•Your purpose
•The landscape
•The climate
•Your capabilities.
It is context specific, i.e.,
these techniques are
known to depend upon
•The landscape
•Your purpose.

5. The first visual - movement based on chess
moves
•He has an interesting theory about
chess – you have to look closely at the
board, and your opponents’ moves
before you decide on your own strategy
•Their strategy will impact your strategy
and you must adapt, as they must adapt
to changes in the environment
•The same can be said of a game of
bridge

6. The first visual - movement based on chess
moves
• His company had a “why of purpose” which was
• To be the best “creative solutions group in the world”.
• It was
• A consultancy
• A European CRM
• An Identity web service
• A fulfilment engine
• An assortment of special projects around 3D printing and the use
of mobiles phones as cameras.
• Mission : survive. This was achieved not through any deliberate focus
on the landscape but by grabbing opportunities and cost-cutting
where we could.
• We lacked the whole “why of movement” that I had seen in Chess.
• He then made the leap from the chess board to topographical
intelligence and how it became a hugely important and decisive factor
in numerous battles of the American Civil War.

7. The first visual - movement based on chess
moves
• He asks the question – why do generals order the bombardment of the hill?
• Not because 67% of other generals order the bombardment of hills, but because
the general has had reconnaissance done, looks at a map, and knows, or thinks
he knows his enemy
• He knows where the enemy is, and knows what the strategy has to be to
eliminate the enemy
• Wardley could think of no equivalent tool in business. He had no equivalent
lessons to learn such as flanking moves, pinning a piece, or standard plays such
as fool’s mate.
• All he had were endless books giving secrets of other people’s success and
extolling the virtues of copying great companies such as
• Fannie Mae (crisis-2008),
• Nokia (loss of market share, ignored developments in US (iPhone, Android) and
• Blockbuster (1985-2010, declined to go into partnership with Netflix).
• Wardley questioned how did anyone know if any of this was right?

8. Maps vs Stories
• If someone asks you for directions and they don’t have a map, you have to tell a
story – turn left, turn right, go straight, turn left, etc.,
• Wardley looked at strategy documents and all he could see was a story.
• A map is context-specific, i.e., the battle in hand. You learn from that context and
how pieces move in it, in much the same way you learn from games in chess. To do
this, you need to know the position of pieces on the map and where they can move
to.
• Position is relative to something. In the case of a geographical map it is relative to
the compass, i.e., this piece is north of that. The compass acts as an anchor for the
map. In the case of a chess board, the board itself is the anchor as in this piece is at
position C1 or B3. This gave me six absolute basic elements for any map which are
• Visual representation
• Context-specific
• Position of
• Components relative to some form of
• Anchor and
• Movement of those components.

9. Ancient Greeks, Maps
• Themistocles’ strategy was to hold the
Persian Navy at Artemesium and the their
Army at the Pass of Thermopylae
• The strategy worked until the betrayal of
the Greeks at Thermopylae
• Themistocles adjusted his strategy to
meet the new landscape (defeat on land)
and eventually defeated the Persian Navy,
and went on to lead the defeat of the
Army

10. Enter John Boyd, AKA The Mad Major
Boyd hypothesized that all intelligent organisms and organizations undergo a
continuous cycle of interaction with their environment. Boyd breaks this cycle
down to four interrelated and overlapping processes through which one cycles
continuously – this resulted in the OODA loop
Wardley has married it to Sun Hzu’s Five Factors and the Two Types of Why
• Observation
• Collection of data by means of the senses
• Orientation
• Analysis and synthesis of data to form one’s current
mental perspective
• Decision
• Determination of a course of action based on one's current mental
perspective
• Action
• Physical playing-out of decisions
• "Time is the dominant parameter. The pilot who goes through the OODA cycle
in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to
situations that have already changed."
•

12. Map Reading
• The map is visual and context specific, i.e., it is unique to that line of business
containing the components that influence it at that moment in time.
• This is not a map of an automotive industry in 2016 or a pharmaceutical
company in 2010 but instead an online photo service in 2005.
• The map has an anchor which is the user (in this case a public customer, though
other types of users exist) and their needs.
• The position of components in the map are shown relative to that user on a
value chain, represented by the y-axis.
• Each component needs the component below it, however the higher up the map
a component is then the more visible it becomes to the user.
• The lower it is then the less visible it becomes.
• For example, in that first map the user cares about online photo storage but
whilst this needs the provision of underlying components such as compute and
power, those components are positioned far from the user and hence are less
visible.

13. Mapping
•Enabled Ubuntu to go from a
small share of the market in
2008 to (see next page)

14. From … to …
•70% market share by 2010

15. More mapping
• More . .
https://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/09/ther
mistocles-swot.html
• https://medium.com/wardleymaps/on-bein
g-lost-2ef5f05eb1ec
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