Be transparent
Being transparent in Wardley Mapping means making decisions, maps, spend, and rationale visible to everyone who depends on them. Wardley highlights transparency as a bias toward open practices: publish the pipeline of change, expose trade-offs, and let peers challenge proposals before inertia sets in. Transparency accelerates learning and keeps strategy rooted in reality.
Why this doctrine matters
- Open information invites scrutiny. When maps, costs, and intent are easy to inspect, duplication and weak arguments surface faster.
- Shared context builds trust. Teams can align on priorities when they see the same data and understand the reasoning behind choices.
- Visibility unlocks ecosystem help. Partners, suppliers, and users can contribute insights or capabilities when they know what is planned.
Practices to embed
- Maintain a public pipeline of work. Keep proposals, maps, spending, and status in a shared place that updates automatically.
- Default to open artefacts. Publish documentation, standards, and source code by default, restricting access only when legally required.
- Narrate decision rationale. When approving or rejecting initiatives, record the user need, mapped context, and constraints so future teams can revisit the logic.
- Encourage external challenge. Invite scrutiny from peer departments, communities, or suppliers and respond visibly to feedback.
Watch for anti-patterns
- Sanitising maps before sharing, hiding the uncomfortable parts of the landscape.
- Treating transparency as a compliance checkbox rather than a tool for learning and accountability.
- Over-sharing raw data without context, leaving people confused about what matters.
Questions to ask
- Who can see our current map, and how quickly do updates reach them?
- What decisions are still made in private that should be visible to the wider system?
- How do we close the loop when someone challenges our plan?
- Where does secrecy protect advantage, and where is it just habit?