chris.daniel
- Improve your chances of success in business by — get this — understanding business strategy.
- Avoid disaster and reduce personal/financial risk by learning how to anticipate change.
- Cultivate agency by learning to read the landscape and choosing moves deliberately.
- Learn how to cultivate opportunities for innovation (whatever that means to you).
- Leverage your market position in order to increase the costs of competitor movement.
- Learn how to design your organization for continuous growth.
- Learn how to make informed purchasing decisions based on external vendor indicators.
- Learn how to perform a competitive analysis.
- Discover the full(er) extent of the work involved in building a given solution.
- Gain a satisfying ability to determine whether an idea is worth pursuing… and waste less time on foolhardy pursuits.
- Learn when to make the tough decision to discontinue or abandon work.
- Make cutting your losses easier to do.
- Encounter fewer deadly surprises during execution, significantly increasing your probability of success.
- Know with certainty whether a given idea or task will contribute to your progress.
- Work on the real problems… not the problem of figuring out what the real problems are.
- Wrangle a failing project back on track.
- Shift from a state of ignorance to situational awareness… so you can be more purposeful.
- Inject clarity into the chaos of project work.
- Kill the lost causes.
- Know how to approach each aspect of the work that must happen.
- Understand when to build and when to buy.
- Understand when to explore (iterate) and when to plan everything out ahead.
- Navigate life with deliberate intention.
- Make well-reasoned decisions.
- Develop an intuition for strategy.
- Leverage shiny new tech when it makes sense and for specific purposes, instead of just copying everyone else.
- Understand the hidden patterns and workings of the world.
- Methodically identify opportunities few others will independently imagine.
- Cultivate excess optionality. You’ll discard many good options because you can…
- By mapping, you elevate the potential of those around you.
- Learn to embrace uncertainty; become comfortable with the unknown. Remember, if this idea doesn’t work, you can methodically find more…
- Improve the quality of decisions made under stress and uncertainty.
- Learn to apply a mindset appropriate for each circumstance.
- Learn about doctrine, boy howdy. First of all, it exists. Second of all, you can write your own.
- Learn how to benchmark your approach to the rest of the world, and THEN how to make exceptions appropriate for your context.
- Compose MVP solutions quickly and efficiently (clients will love you).
- Avoid inane startups.
- Related: Sniff out BS and invest wisely.
- Design entire businesses around your spontaneous ideas using the back of a napkin.
- Share your napkins with others. They’ll be able to show you where you’re wrong.
- Refocus business on serving real people instead of worshipping the tech machine.
- Change the trajectory of your career. // @kelseyhightower
- Get a different job.
- Understand abstract problems. Wardley Mapping doesn’t care how weird you get.
- Acknowledge your attack surface. Market, security, whatever.
- Stop pretending your complex system is simple. Acknowledge reality.
- Know where the secret sauce is, and where it isn’t.
- Don’t become a company that has to write and maintain software until you ABSOLUTELY need to. (Ok that one was a little specific, but it still pains me every time I think about it.
) - Dominate at hackathons or anywhere else rapid idea prototyping needs to happen. Or at least avoid being the completely disorganized group!
- Identify your constraints. Then you can start thinking about whether to blow them up, circumvent them, or just make them work for you.
- Find key points of leverage in impossibly big systems.
- Run smooth gatherings and events.
- Serve the underserved, and help them gain asymmetrical advantage.
- Destroy greed by wrecking exploitative business models.
- When selling your ideas, avoid using concepts your users don’t care about.
- Learn to ignore hot air (industry FUD, pointless technology feuds, etc.).
- Know when to team up instead of competing, all while preventing your lunch from being eaten.
- Learn how to pivot by taking stock of the knowledge and capabilities you already have.
- Become comfortable dodging and weaving in existential territory. Few will follow.
- Learn when to be concerned by failure and when to embrace it.
- Learn when to use the latest tech and when to be an old fart about it.
- Know the cost of commitment by weighing future inertia against current flexibilities.
- Make sense of weak signals in the market… “Why did they do it that way?”
- Stop wasting your short time on this earth on pointless efforts that don’t contribute to the system you’re in. (Hey now!)
- Translate strategy across industries and generations to realize its relevance to the here and now.
- Manage delegated and outsourced work well by knowing what conversations to have and what to expect.
- Experience the joy of spending less time worrying about how to make decisions. You’ll be busy making them.
- Avoid methodology religious wars through universal respect and awareness of context-specificity.
- Build skill and intuition that is useful in any purposeful context.
- Win more than you lose. Winning is fun.
- Imposters, enjoy a moment of feeling competent by acknowledging the many things you do actually know. (Then keep working on the specific ones you don’t.)
- Decentralize decision-making. If they’ve made a map, you know they at least have a rationale (which is more than you can say about the average bear).
- Leverage imperfect information. The map doesn’t care that you’re wrong, only that you’re using it to document your assumptions along the way.
- Develop ethical plays when the pressure is to do the opposite. You’ll be able to find a way.
- Tear apart legacy systems and make conceptual sense of them.
- Recognize the holes in your ability to deliver on promises to your users.
- Know which dependencies you can control, which you can influence, and which ones you’ll just have to accept as-is.
- Deploy and use your existing time and efforts more effectively, freeing up $$$.
- Turn a map into words to propose action that makes an excessive amount of sense (or is at least difficult to refute).
- Create space for the conversations that really need to happen.
- Give people something to point at during those conversations. No surprise here, but it’ll help them focus.
- By taking EVEN THE FIRST STEP towards learning to map, you discover IMPORTANT STUFF about your situation that will change how and what you think! (I admit, this probably should have been #1.)
- The kernels of truth in your map help you fake it less or at least better than everyone else.
- Get unstuck! There’s always more mapping to do, and you’ll be inspired by what you find.
- Communicate more effectively through the language learned by building a map together.
- Learn more effectively, together. Your shared language, developed alongside a map on the wall, embraces visual, kinesthetic, and auditory learning styles.
- Uncover the hidden logic behind seemingly arbitrary decisions by service providers. (And whether there is any to be had!)
- Scale a company with less pain than most experience.
- Recognize sinking ships before they go under.
- Steer others away from deadly mistakes.
- Have healthier conflict with clients by agreeing on an artifact (the map). “You didn’t deliver what you promised…” turns into “Our needs changed…”
- Discover the expertise that’s missing from your organization, where to find it, and how to bring it in.
- Understand the territory borders… where to play, where to fish for opportunities, and where to stay the heck away from.
- Understand what’s truly unique about you or your organization, as well as whether that uniqueness is beneficial or harmful to your goals.
- Contribute more meaningfully to open source projects. You’ll be able to tell which things are holding projects back and where to best use your attention, since you’re volunteering it.
- Plan for market scenarios to better respond if and when they occur.
- Provide an outlet to hear out, learn from, and even prototype wild ideas with relative safety.
- Get to the essence of things. Talk directly about the thing instead of meandering endlessly around the thing.
- Win the impossible battles, especially by resolving them peacefully.
Originally published on twitter by @bemosior under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
