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Positioning Readiness for the AI Age

· 5 min read
Dave Hulbert
Dave Hulbert
Builder and maintainer of Wardley Leadership Strategies

In the last post, we explored how the OODA loop provides a framework for accelerating decision-making in a fast-paced, AI-driven world. But speed is not enough. To be effective, decisions must be grounded in a deep understanding of the strategic landscape.

Great positioning makes average plays look brilliant; poor positioning turns brilliant minds into passengers. Wardley Maps expose that truth better than any dashboard. When you see the landscape clearly you stop judging teams on charisma and start judging them on the quality of their starting position, their ability to sense change, and the readiness of their next move.

Position beats brilliance​

Position is not an abstract concept. It is the combination of user needs, value chain dependencies, and evolutionary stage. A highly talented AI team building custom features on components that have already become commodities will still lose. Meanwhile, a modest team that controls a constraint that competitors depend on can dictate the pace of change. The best leaders obsess about the shape of the map more than the resumes of their experts, because position determines which moves are even viable.

Consider a legacy payments provider that still owns a regulated clearing license. Even if its technology stack is clunky, its position gives it leverage. It can open its clearing rails as utilities, bundle compliance-as-a-service, or orchestrate a marketplace of fintechs. A rival without that positional anchor could spend years negotiating access and still feel like it's chasing shadows.

Sensing agents extend the map​

Traditional map reviews are held in workshops, but that rhythm doesn't work when the landscape is changing weekly. Sensing agents can fix this gap. They can subscribe to telemetry from every component—usage, latency, supply risk, regulatory change—and update the map's status automatically. Instead of debating stale diagrams, leadership can debate the new signals: "Cloud costs on our differentiating AI training stack have spiked by 40%—is our position still defensible?" The map becomes a live nervous system rather than a quarterly artefact, especially when you layer in the ambient hygiene described in background AI for continual improvement.

An infrastructure team at a global retailer wired agents into their fulfilment map. When weather models and shipping telemetry signalled a disruption in a corridor, the agents reclassified the distribution hub from industrialised to constrained. The leaders were able to respawn workflows within hours: they spun up micro-warehouses and rerouted stock before their competitors even noticed. The position had shifted, the map highlighted it, and the sensing agents translated it into action.

Readiness for multiple plays​

The power of AI agents is not just in sensing the landscape, but also in reducing the cost of being ready for several moves at once. In mapping terms, this means you can hold options across multiple components without paralysing the organisation.

Take a satellite communications company that is watching the evolution of ground terminals. Its map shows three plausible futures: commoditised terminals from hyperscalers, open-source modems, or vertically integrated national champions. Instead of betting on one outcome, the leadership team builds agent-enabled playbooks for each path:

  • Utility pivot – Procurement agents monitor hyperscaler pricing and can shift the company to a wholesale utility model, with approved commercial terms already templated.
  • Open-ecosystem surge – Community agents cultivate the open-source modem community, ready to release reference designs and support packages the moment adoption crosses a certain threshold.
  • Sovereign alliance – Partnership agents maintain conversations with government buyers, ready to assemble a joint venture if geopolitics force national consolidation.

When the map shows which of these futures is materialising, the relevant play can be fired without a scramble. The options were held cheaply because the prep work, the guardrails, and the agent orchestration were already in place.

Leadership implications​

Positioning and readiness are no longer periodic strategy exercises; they are everyday leadership disciplines.

  1. Keep the map alive – Appoint owners for each critical component, make sure that sensing agents are feeding it, and treat map hygiene as operational debt.
  2. Codify multi-play doctrine – Document the guardrails for each potential move so that agents know when they are authorised to execute.
  3. Stress-test optionality – Run scenario drills in which agents simulate each play, revealing capability gaps or ethical traps before reality forces your hand.
  4. Reward positional advantage – Celebrate teams that improve the organisation's position, not just those that ship features.

Leaders who combine positional clarity with agent-enabled readiness convert situational awareness into decisive action. Everyone looks smart when the organisation is already standing in the right place with plays primed. The real craft is making that position and readiness the default state—and running regular LLM competitor simulations so the optionality you hold maps to the moves rivals are most likely to make next.

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