Understand the Shape of the Game You're Playing - Commoncog

Blog Comments
21

Hi @cedric , thanks for the thoughtful reply. Of course, it’s your rigour and search for truly helpful guidance that keeps me on CommonCog, and so many other subscribers.

And I do appreciate that you had my comments in mind when you acknowledged an almost-redeeming feature of the book.

I think what I mostly wanted to make clear is that I do see Rumelt as a serious practitioner and also an author who is at least better than most of those you find on the business shelf / self-help shelves of airport bookshops.

But I also know that many people found Good Strategy, Bad Strategy unsatisfying. Apart from your comments, and reviews I’ve read to the same effect, a colleague of mine (years ago) said that he liked the ideas but just didn’t understand how to put them into practice.

Reading the followup book from Rumelt, The Crux, I got the impression that he too had become aware of the lack of practical guidance in GS/BS. The Crux is full of suggestions on techniques and tools. (Though I can’t say I found it more useful than GS/BS at the time when I read it.) Here is a passage from The Crux that talks about the guidance gap in strategy literature in general, but could be seen as including GS/BS in that field:

“There must be some system for creating a logical business strategy,” Carolyn finishes.

I get a sudden mental flash-a visual picture of an imaginary “strategy calculator,” something like Figure 3. I keep it to myself, as Carolyn is not in the mood for humor.

In truth, Carolyn is in a tough spot. She has put her finger on what has been the great missing piece in the foundation of almost all writings and teachings about strategy. This weakness was well captured more than a decade ago by strategy authority Gary Hamel: “Of course, everyone knows a strategy once they see one-be it Micro. soft’s, Nucor’s, or Virgin Atlantic’s. Anyone can recognize a great strategy after the fact. We also understand planning as a 'process. The only problem is that process doesn’t produce strategy- it produces plans. The dirty little secret of the strategy industry is that it doesn’t have any theory of strategy Creation.” (By “strategy industry” Hamel means the cadre of academics and consultants who opine about and are hired to work on strategy.)

Still, I am not trying to demand a CommonCog review of The Crux :grinning:

It may well be that what Rumelt has to offer just isn’t the kind of thing that you consider useful, and in any case I do appreciate you putting yourself through re-reading and re-evaluating GS/BS.

2 Likes
22

As Wardleymaps were mentioned earlier in this reply thread, I figured I’d try to contribute. I have been using Wardley Maps as a strategy/innovation consultant for 4 years and have studied many other aspects of strategy (scenario planning etc). Here is my take on Cedrics essay and Wardleymaps:

1: Rummelt’s book is excellent for what it contributes: a formula to understand if what we have is a worthwhile strategy. And it is especially worth pointing out the mass of misunderstandings around what strategy is. The book is incredibly frustrating since it gives no hints other than “study the problem, use your intuition” for how to come up with a good strategy.

2: In my opinion, Rummelt’s formula for good strategy is just a re-formulation of the OODA loop, i.e., Observe, orient, decide, act (and yes, OODA is so much more, but in its crudest form, that’s the steps of strategy formation). The diagnosis is an observation and an orientation that provides options we can act upon. It is not entirely 1 to 1 but more or less in line.

  1. All strategy formulation requires a level of analysis (breaking things apart into constituencies) and Synthesis (making something new from the parts). In general, the synthesis is the problem; this is where intuition comes in. Where Wardley maps shine is that they provide scaffolding for the synthesis part of strategy formulation. They help our intuition. Why? Because they provide a way to learn pattern recognition. Through this pattern recognition, we can rule out many of the moves we might have tried if we did not have solid business intuition for our situation

  2. Someone mentioned that the key to strategy is to know how your customers make buying decisions. Yes, that is key, but if you are stuck in some form of legacy (Kodak or Nokia style), or as in Cedric’s example, you failed to qualify for a specific subsidy, knowing the buying process would not be enough. Wardley mapping is the only framework I know of that combines the “front end,” i.e., understanding the customer journey, with the back end, i.e., how trends and market forces change how we deliver value. This is key to making Maps such a helpful tool for synthesis.

  3. Wardley maps are a tool; like every tool, they can’t be used for everything and are not the answer to everything. But they are a good starting point. Cedric, let me know if you want to create a Wardley map of your point of sale experience (or other situation) to determine if it might have shortened your time to enlightenment. I’m happy to help; the inertia to get started can be pretty intense…

3 Likes
23

Thanks for the summary, @johan.persson!

I’m calling this out because I do want to circle back to this — after I’m done with my obligations for the data driven series. I find your pitch quick compelling, and this makes you the third (or fourth?) person to have talked about Wardley Maps in this forum. Colour me interested.

2 Likes
24

I’ve been digging into Wardley maps lately (some very good talks by Wardley on youtube). It’s way more deep than you’d realize, very well thought through, and there are all manners of ways he has found to use it to help with thinking and observing patterns. It seems incredibly powerful, and I’m excited to get better at using it.

However, does seem like competency and fluency come only after a lot of practice. I can see why it would be hard to socialize and get colleagues to adopt it unless they are also nerdy about these kinds of things.

Would be very anxious to hear your take, @cedric .

4 Likes
25

Harping back on this topic thanks to a talk that I watched by Simon Wardley.

He mentions about the Patterns and there being 40 of them. He talks about Innovate, leverage and commodify as being one of the patterns.

Do any of you have a resource to the list of patterns in Wardley mapping?

2 Likes
26

Here’s a site that has then listed. I wish there were mapped examples, though.

3 Likes
27

Back to the de-facto Wardley Maps thread - I recently tried and liked MapKeep as a tool for building them that’s more tailored than a generic whiteboarding tool.

I was using it to outline strategy on my new data clean rooms product, and found the Wardley Map to be useful for understanding and communicating what our focus is on, and why.

Coming back to Cedric’s criteria:

  1. The Shape of the Game should tell you what to ignore. - :white_check_mark: the map visualizes that several potentially-attractive areas of investment are actually commodities.

  2. The Shape of the Game should be predictive. - :question: too early to tell, hopefully I’ll have a good update later.

  3. The Shape of the Game should allow you to discard strategies as implausible or insufficiently advantaged. - :white_check_mark: as new entrants into an existing market, the map helps emphasize where our strongest advantages are relative to incumbents (and correspondingly, discard weaker-but-still-interesting ideas)

One caveat is that I only drew the map after lots of other internal strategy discussion and thinking - so there might be some confirmation bias here. I wish I had a map from 3 months ago, for comparison.

3 Likes
28

Mapkeep is by far the best tool I have used for this purpose. It takes away lots of pain. Also, the guy developing the tool, Tristan, is a very amicable and smart person.

2 Likes