Evaluating multiple Wardley Maps through node profile diagrams

Wardley Mapping is a way to gain situational awareness around a subject. Simon Wardley often encourages people to map not only a domain, but rather a perspective over that domain. For example, instead of mapping "The future of work" consider "The future of work from the perspective of humane work environments", or "The future of work from the perspective of organizational structure and governance".

Of course, when we map from multiple perspectives we might end up with partial overlap of the considered concepts in our maps. That might appear as a waste of effort, but it can actually be transformed into an opportunity: we can check for how consistent the concepts are perceived from different perspectives. To do this, Simon introduced the idea of node profiles.

Consider a case as below: we have multiple maps on the same topic from different perspectives. Some of the nodes appear multiple times. The repeating nodes are shown on a single line depicting their positions on the evolution axis.

Simon Wardley said: The diagram above was done manually. Surely we can use #GToolkit to do this for us.

So we paired for an hour or so. And then a colleague joined for a few minutes as well. And we got to the following result.

We start with a page in a knowledge base that contains a map. The map has nodes with links to other pages that contain maps. A map of maps, if you will.

We use this page as a table of contents for the maps we want to have a consolidated view on. To this end, we produce a small script within the same page and executing it gives us an inspector over a group of maps. A view on that group is the node profiles, rendered slightly differently.

Clicking on the a node in the node profile shows us the node highlighted within the context of the map.

This is an interesting example of how #MoldableDevelopment can guide an exploration. The result is not an elaborate tool. In fact, there is no tool. There are only small pieces composed in a moldable environment. But this solution already does the job much better than the manual alternative.