Doctrine or Dogma?
By: Erik Schön
Tags: Wardley Mapping, Mapping, Strategy, Wardley Maps, Business

Doctrine or Dogma?

“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.” John Boyd, Strategist, Inventor of the OODA “Loop”

Introduction

It is important to challenge your own and your team’s assumptions — in a friendly way — in order to learn and get better at creating strategy. One way of doing this is using Wardley Mapping of the evolving business and technology landscape — making implicit assumptions explicit on a map.

When creating strategy, before doing context specific gameplays, it is important to start with assessing and improving your doctrine: the universally useful principles guiding your ways of operating, organising and communicating.

In the spirit of challenging your assumptions and avoiding doctrine becoming dogma, I share an experiment: a Wardley Map of Wardley’s doctrine.

This article has the following structure — skip the parts you already know:

How Can We Be More Certain to Succeed? Introduces strategy and visualising strategy using Wardley Mapping.

What is Doctrine and Why do We Need It?

What are Capabilities and Why Do We Need Them?

What are Capabilities and Why Do We Need Them? How Can We Visualise Capabilities? Introduces Values Chains, System Anatomies, Anatomies of Excellent Development and Maturity Mapping.

How Can We Visualise Doctrine? Introduces Wardley’s doctrine and shows how it can be categorised, phased and visualised for assessment and improvement purposes.

How Can We Be More Certain To Succeed?

Parts of the world have always been volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous — think of tsunamis, freak waves, wars, the Black Death in Europe in the Middle Ages, …

The Wave of the Future — Digital Transformation of The Great Wave. Illustration: Kirpich and Berry

Now, the digital transformation towards software and world-wide communication is increasing the speed by several orders of magnitude since bits travel so much faster than atoms. Organisations are struggling to cope with the massive changes in customer behaviours, products, services, and business models that this entails.

In essence: In a world where the rate of change will never be slower than today, how can we be more certain to succeed?

The answer, going back at least 2500 years to Sun Tzu, is strategy — “the art of manipulating an environment to gain a desirable outcome” (Simon Wardley swardley). You can never be completely certain, but you can create conditions for stacking the odds in your favour, e.g. through assessments, preparations and gameplays.

The Strategy Cycle

The Strategy Cycle is an iterative cycle for creating strategy and making strategy happen — combining Sun Tzu’s five fundamental factors (purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, leadership), John Boyd’s OODA “Loop” (Observe, Orient, Decidem Act) and the two types of “why”:

the “why” of purpose, e.g. a chess player wants to win every game and become a master. the “why” of movement, e.g. a chess player moves the queen to gain a better position.

Visualising the World Using Maps

Let’s look at a classic way of visualising the world for increased understanding and decision support: maps.

A map is visual, context-specific (in this case of the old town of Shanghai in 1814) showing position and components (here: the location of houses, roads, walls, rivers, bridges, …) and movement (“getting to X”) including an anchor (the Chinese sign for “north” at the top).

Geographical maps encode information about a given context much more efficiently and clearly than words written or spoken. Reading a map requires you to study and understand the language of maps, and, of course, practice using maps.

Visualising Strategy Using Wardley Maps

Geographical maps are visualisations of the world that guide us from A to B. Wardley Maps are visualisations of the technology and business landscape for a specific context showing technology and business evolution and guiding our strategic choices of what to do and not to do.

Here’s an example of a Wardley Map visualising the context of online gaming:

Wardley Map of online gaming. Abbreviations: PSN (Play Station Network), CDN (Content Delivery Network), API (Application Programming Interface). Illustration: Howard Rees

The vertical axis shows needs where needs at the top are fully visible to your customers all the way to components completely invisible and far away from your customers.

The horizontal axis shows the evolution of the components:

Genesis: the unique, the very rare, the uncertain, the constantly changing and the newly discovered. Our focus is on exploration.

Custom Built: representing the very uncommon and that which we are still learning about. It is individually made and tailored for a specific environment. It is bespoke. It frequently changes. It is an artisan skill.

Product (+ rental): the increasingly common, the manufactured through a repeatable process, the more defined, the better understood. Change becomes slower here. Whilst there exists differentiation particularly in the early stages there is increasing stability and sameness.

Commodity (+ utility): scale and volume operations of production, the highly standardized, the defined, the fixed, the undifferentiated, the fit for a specific known purpose and repetition, repetition and more repetition.

The customer is the anchor of a Wardley map, similar to north in geographical map. We also see components (e.g. “Content”) and their positions and relationships, e.g. how “Content” needs or depends upon “CDN (Content Distribution Network”). These relationships form a value chain — a chain of needs — with customer needs and components arranged according to dependency — running from needs visible to the customer in the uppermost part of the Wardley Map to components least visible in the lower part of the map. And, finally, the red arrows show the evolution of components from uncharted to industrialised territory.

Wardley Maps have the same characteristics as geographical maps, i.e. it is a map that visually shows the evolution of a context specific value chain using position and movement of components — with customer needs as the anchor.

Wardley Mapping enables collaboration for improved predictions and shaping the future by helping participants articulate, share and assess their perceptions and understanding of the environment. This leads to a common, shared context specific language and a common, shared visualisation that can be used to guide decisions and actions on what to do. It also makes implicit assumptions explicit in an object — the map — which is much more easy to challenge than a person.

What is Doctrine and Why do We Need It?

Doctrine is one of Sun Tzu’s five fundamental factors of strategy. Sun Tzu’s eternal wisdom advises us to always start our journey by assessing and preparing by asking ourselves the following questions about our own organisation as well as our competitors in order to know who will succeed:

Who has more influential purpose?

Who has more skilled leadership?

Who is favoured by landscape and climate?

Who carries out doctrine more skilfully?

more skilfully? Who has more capabilities?

Who provides feedback more clearly?

Doctrine is universally useful principles guiding ways of operating, organising and communicating that can be applied regardless of context, landscape or climate. Doctrine is not covering values and associated behaviours. Doctrine is never eternally correct, it has proven to be consistently valuable for a large number of users for the time being. There will always exist better doctrine in the future as the world evolves and we learn more, hence the need to challenge doctrine to avoid that it becomes dogma.

Here are a few examples of Wardley’s doctrine:

Use a common language, e.g. Wardley Maps (communication)

Challenge assumptions (communication): “Wardley Maps allow for assumptions to be visually exposed. You should encourage challenge to any map with a focus on creating a better map and a better understanding. Don’t be afraid of challenge, there is no place for ego if you want to learn.” (@swardley)

Focus on user needs (development)

Know the details (operations)

Bias towards data (learning)

Move fast (leading)

Think small teams (structure)

Doctrine consists of principles that are valid irrespective of context; the implementation of those principles, however, will be different in different contexts. In other words, the principles of doctrine, the what and why, e.g. focus on user needs, are different from the implementation of doctrine, the how in context, e.g. the user needs for the most convenient tea shop in Kent.

What are Capabilities and Why Do We Need Them?

A capability is the ability to fulfil a user’s need, or, the ability of a component to fulfil the need(s) of another component in a Value Chain or a Wardley Map. This means that both products and organisations have capabilities and that capabilities can be used to describe doctrine.

As we saw in the previous section, one of Sun Tzu’s questions at the start our journey for assessing and preparing in order to know who will succeed, is:

who has more capabilities?

How Can We Visualise Capabilities?

Here are four ways of visualising capabilities: values chains, system anatomies, anatomies of excellent development and maturity mapping.

Value Chains

A Value Chain is a visualisation of the dependency chain of needs starting with what the users value. Alternatively, is a a set of activities that an organisation performs — or capabilities needed — in order to deliver a product valuable for the users.

Example of a value chain of needs for an online photo service. Illustration: swardley (CC BY-SA 4.0)

System Anatomies

A System Anatomy is a dependency graph of functional capabilities for a product. It looks very similar to a value chain.

Example of s system anatomy of capabilities for travel card reader in a bus. Illustration: Kristian Sandahl

System Anatomies have been used in very large scale development of complex network products (hardware and software) since 1991.

Anatomy of Excellent Development

An Anatomy of Excellent Development is a dependency graph of capabilities for a team or organisation. It is used to visualise, assess and improve a team or an organisation. This anatomy stems from the System Anatomy and instead of showing dependencies between functional capabilities for a product, the Anatomy of Excellent Development shows the wanted capabilities for a team or organisation that are needed to fulfil the mission of being excellent at doing product/software development, i.e. a doctrine for product development. The capabilities are about what is needed and this is independent of context; exactly which methods and tools that are needed to realise the capabilities are context dependent.