Effective collaboration requires a shared language. Maps help diverse teams like marketing, operations, finance, and IT to develop a common understanding. A robust governance system promotes coordination and shared learning, ensuring best practices are discovered and disseminated. Ideally, one coherent explanation method should exist across all business functions.

Practices that can help:

• Corporate glossary (one place where you can look up things)

• Cross functional teams

• Culture of sharing

• Maps (of course) because they depict situation and initiatives - so everyone will know what are you doing and why

Many projects failed because some people were afraid to speak up. They were not afraid out of cowardice but because their leaders retributed challenging ideas and assumptions.

Do not be a leader like that.

Allow people to ask questions and challenge assumptions in a creative way. Seek those challengers.

At the same time, be vary of nay-sayers and people who will inevitably challenge you and your decisions, not your assumptions.

Maps are a good tool to redirect people attention from people to the situation.

Focus on awareness to improve performance.

Understand your competitive landscape and proposals.

Increase situational awareness by developing maps that reflect user needs, value chains, and evolution.

Governance must align with these needs, making maps essential to the governance structure - no project can happen unless you know what is going on.

Any value we create is through meeting the needs of others. A mantra of "not sucking as much as the competitors" is not acceptable. We must be the best we can be.

When mapping a landscape then know who your users are e.g. customers, shareholders, regulators and staff.

You are not the user, do not start with yourself.

An essential part of mapping is the anchor of user needs.

Ideally you want to create an environment where your needs are achieved by meeting the needs of your users.

Be mindful that these needs will evolve due to competition and in the uncharted space they are uncertain.

Also, be aware that users may have different and competing needs and be prepared to balance the conflict.

Remove duplication and bias by eliminating custom-built commodities and redundant systems.

Encourage effective communication to overcome organizational inertia. Recognize that duplication often exceeds expectations, and addressing it may affect individuals' projects.

Large organizations frequently underestimate the extent of duplicated efforts and systems.

Comparing maps from different departments/projects can help.

Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach; no single method suits all environments. Use agile, lean, six sigma, or other methods as appropriate. Governance must embrace multiple techniques based on context. Be wary of ego and tribalism around preferred methods, as large systems often require diverse approaches simultaneously.

Know the details, use small teams and break large landscapes into small contracts.

Don't be chased away by fears of complexity of management or "too many interfaces to manage".

The governance system must provide a mechanism of consistent measurement against outcomes and for continuous improvement of measurements.

The purpose of mapping is not just to create a map and a shared understanding but also to learn climatic patterns, doctrine and context specific play.

Maps provide a systematic way of doing this as long as you collate, review and learn from them. Have a bias towards such learning and the use of data.

We don't hide our maps, we share them and allow others to challenge and question our assumptions.

The act of sharing is essential because it helps us to learn. Transparency also requires us to remove all the noise, the pointless gibberish that gets in the way of learning.

Those unwilling to learn will be guided to new jobs.

Governance must be entirely transparent, publishing proposals openly to foster internal and external examination and interaction, avoiding secretive map-building.

Try to focus on what you are trying to achieve rather than the formal specificaiton.

Realise that different types of contract will be needed e.g. outsourced or time and material based or worth based development.

To achieve value for money, adopt Dan Ward's principles: act quickly, use inexpensive and reusable components, and simplify problems. Break large systems into small, manageable parts, and ensure governance encourages speed, frugality, and simplicity. Be ready for resistance, but acknowledge that managing interfaces is unavoidable, regardless of system size.

The smaller the investment - the better.

Using appropriate tools means selecting the best methods and technologies for the task at hand.

This means you need to understand the task first and then use a proper set of tools.

In strategy, it means switching between different approaches as appropriate.

"It does not matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice."

Focs on user needs and simplicity, avoid reinventing existing components.

Challenge attempts to do so.

Acknowledge edge cases but prioritize cost reduction and improvement.

Avoid building your own solutions when effective, standardized services exist. Using industrialized, existing services is more practical and cost-effective. Resist the temptation to create new standards or layers without a compelling reason. If a toaster is needed, buy one—don't build it from scratch.

We all have inertia from past successes, shown by phrases like "this always worked", "don't fix what isn't broken." or "we have invested so much, we have to find use for it". Recognize and question this resistance to change. Listen to challengers, understand the root causes, and use maps to anticipate and address inertia, helping others discover their own.

Every system has risks. Use maps to understand failure modes and impacts. Mitigate risks by distributing systems, designing for failure, and introducing controlled failures (e.g., Netflix's chaos monkey). Avoid large, monolithic projects prone to significant failures.

Optimizing (seeking efficiency) is more important. But we frequently forget about the big picture and ways to accomplish the same outcome by using completely different, more effective tools.

Doing is the ultimate way of learning.

Planning and preparations are important but they have their own pitfalls:

• people can waste a lot of time chasing knowledge that does not exist yet

• people can use imperfect preparation as a justification for delaying action (usually, due to the fear of being wrong).

  
  

An imperfect plan executed today is better than a perfect one tomorrow.

Implementing FIRE/FIST principles is futile if decision-making takes too long. Speed is crutial.

If you are in a new role, expect resistance will grow over time. If you do not introduce changes quickly, it will be difficult to do so later.

Avoid writing long-winded strategy documents and detailed future plans. Instead, focus on iterative, adaptable strategies.

Strategy should be a direction, adapting quickly and continuously learning—"cross the river by feeling the stones."

Break everything into small teams. For uncharted exploration, use teams of 3-5. For building products, two pizza teams (up to 12) are ideal. Larger teams may be needed for industrialized components but should never exceed the Dunbar number. Teams larger than 40 should be split based on user needs.

Distribute power to those closest to decision-making.

Allow departments to self-organize to meet central policy.

Governance should avoid imposing methodologies, enabling autonomous decisions.

Use maps to challenge and improve operations, helping departments reconsider approaches like outsourcing by examining their own maps.

Each team combines aptitudes (skills like networks, marketing, engineering, finance) with attitudes (cultural approaches and methods). Agile development differs from industrialized tasks, so consider both aptitude and attitude when forming teams. This combination defines capability.

Recognize that people have varied mindsets (pioneer, settler, town planner) beyond their skills.

Remove bottlenecks and improve throughput, ensuring situational awareness to avoid making ineffective processes more efficient. Ruthlessly eliminate obstacles to meeting user needs, speed, and transparency, such as complex expense processes. Simplify by using company credit cards with clear spending guidelines. Optimize various capital flows—information, risk, social, and financial—within a map.

Bias towards continual improvement. Ensure transparency and cost measurement, challenging current projects. Develop a scrutiny board for spend control, focusing on reducing waste and improving public services through iteration. Use open data for government transparency, open source practices, and open standards to foster competitive markets. Measure progress constantly.

Don't settle for as good as or slightly better than competitors. Always strive for the very best that can be achieved.

Whatever you do will evolve. So have a bias towards the new, be curious and take appropriate risks. Be willing to experiment.

Focus on outside-in innovation, driven locally with seed funds, rather than big, top-down initiatives.

Once you've set a direction commit to it.

There will often be hurdles and obstacles but don't just simply abandon a direction because a single step is challenging. Try to find paths around the obstacles. If you're building a system and a common component is not as expected then that can often prove a market opportunity.

Take responsibility for your environment, your actions within it and how you play the game.

You could outsource this to a third party in the way a chess player could outsource their gameplay to another but you won't learn and it is still you that loses.

Think small for actions, organization, and details, but think big for inspiration, direction, and moral purpose. Focus on the larger goal, not just isolated systems. Shift public services to online, automated processes, prioritizing citizen needs and delivery. Aim for comprehensive problem-solving rather than defending narrow specifics.

Embrace uncertainty and surprises in competition due to other actors. Avoid believing you can plan the future. Focus on preparation and adaptability, as these are more important than any fixed plan.

Listen, be selfless, show fortitude, and remain humble. Inspire through actions and character. Avoid manipulating perceptions, as it can lead to believing your own hype and a false sense of market entitlement. These manipulations have internal and external costs.

Find and nurture the best people with the right aptitudes and attitudes. Invest in retaining them without forcing them into unsuitable roles. Exceptional talent should be valued appropriately, even if they remain in specialized positions. Avoid promoting people into roles that don't suit them, as leadership, management, and engineering are all valuable. Ensure pay scales reflect true value, not hierarchy, to retain talent effectively.

Each team should be autonomous within its defined purpose (fitness function) and own its responsibilities.

Teams must understand their role within the larger picture (using maps) and develop mastery in both skills and approach.

Provide purpose, scope for action, and the freedom to build mastery and autonomy.

Ecosystems offer various exploitation methods, acting as sensing engines for change and fostering cooperation and alliances. They require management, akin to gardening—sometimes letting them grow wild, other times directing or harvesting. Develop skills to manage them, but always listen to them. Shift from a centralized approach to a frontline-focused engineering group that nurtures change opportunities with service providers.

Use the landscape to your advantage, there are often powerful force multipliers. You might decide not to take advantage of a competitor or a change in the market but that should be a conscious choice.

Everything is transient, whatever you think is core to your company won't be at some point in the future. The only things that are truly static are dead.

A company planning for longevity must manage both uncharted discoveries and industrialized components, requiring diverse attitudes. Cultivate multiple cultures within the organization, such as pioneers, settlers, and town planners. Embrace these differences rather than enforcing a uniform culture, as variety fosters happiness and effectiveness.

Teams may be semi-permanent, but their work evolves. Pioneers discover new areas, settlers productize them, and town planners industrialize the products, promoting continuous progression. Establish an organizational system that handles this flow without constant restructuring. A cell-based structure with pioneers, settlers, and town planners supports this dynamic process.