About Wardley Leadership Strategies
This guide is a comprehensive resource for applying strategic plays (gameplays) within the framework of Wardley Mapping. It builds upon the work of Simon Wardley, providing practical guidance on over 60 business and organizational leadership strategies.
Simon Wardley has listed these in his blog post On 61 different forms of gameplay and there are many other sites like Learn Wardley Mapping that have lists of these strategies.
Understanding and Applying Strategic Gameplays
Wardley Mapping provides a visual method for understanding your competitive landscape and anticipating future changes. This situational awareness, derived from your map, is the first step for effective strategic decision-making. This guide focuses on the application of those strategic decisions: the "gameplays" that allow you to achieve your objectives.
This resource offers detailed explanations, real-world examples, and practical advice on selecting and implementing over 60 strategies, including examples such as:
- Cooperation: Leveraging partnerships to accelerate growth.
- Creating Constraints: Using limitations to drive innovation and focus.
- Experimentation: Rapidly testing new approaches to gain a competitive edge.
The site also includes an interactive 🚦 Strategy Assessment Tool for some strategies, allowing you to evaluate the applicability and readiness of a specific strategy within your context.
Use the interactive Strategy Navigator to combine goals, evolution stages, and organisational pressures into a tailored shortlist of plays. Compare recommended strategies side by side to understand signals, first moves, and watch-outs before committing.
To understand the broader organisational capabilities that enable those plays, explore the Strategy Maturity Model, which charts how teams progress from ad hoc experimentation to doctrine-led mastery.
Explore Additional Resources
- My Assessments: Track the strategies you've evaluated with the assessment tool, revisit past answers, and spot patterns in where your organisation is ready to move next.
- AI & Leadership: Dive into essays that translate Wardley Mapping principles for an age of automation—covering practical leadership responses to AI hype, adoption risks, and capability building.
- Books: Browse curated reading lists that underpin the practices on this site, from mapping fundamentals to organisational change playbooks.
- Strategy Guides: Get step-by-step playbooks for common scenarios, starting with the Introduction to Strategic Play to orient new teams.
Over time it has expanded with dedicated sections on Climatic Patterns and Doctrine. These provide additional context for why a strategy works, but the primary emphasis remains on the gameplays themselves.
Who is this Guide For?
This guide is designed for leaders, strategists, and anyone involved in making strategic decisions within an organization. A basic understanding of Wardley Mapping principles (value chains, evolution stages) and general business strategy concepts is assumed. This resource is most effective after you have:
- Mapped your Landscape: Created a visual representation of your business environment.
- Identified your Context: Understood your current position and the forces acting upon you.
- Analyzed Evolution: Determined the evolutionary stage of the components in your value chain.
Strategic gameplays are the culmination of the Wardley Mapping process. They represent the actions you take based on your map-derived insights. As Wardly put it: without a map you have no strategy.
As described in Learn Wardley Mapping, effective leadership involves:
Making strategic decisions based on your purpose ("the game"), a description of the competitive landscape (the map), the external forces acting on the landscape (climate), and the training of your people (doctrine).
This guide helps you translate the insights gained from mapping, climatic patterns analysis, and doctrine into concrete, actionable strategies.
Contribution and Licensing
This guide is an open-source project, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This encourages collaboration and continuous improvement. We welcome contributions from the community to expand and refine this resource.
The site was built by Dave Hulbert using Docusaurus. The source code is available on GitHub.