Gameplay

Wardley Mapping gameplays are repeatable strategic moves you can apply once you understand your landscape. Thanks to mapping’s explicit depiction of users, needs, value chains, and evolution, common patterns become visible and reusable.

Use gameplays to reduce friction, evolve components, shape markets, and outmaneuver competitors. Gameplays work best when grounded in situational awareness and paired with Doctrine.

How to use gameplays

1. Map the situation (users, needs, components, dependencies).
2. Locate constraints, inertia, duplication, and mismatches between methods and component characteristics.
3. Select gameplays that fit the context (often in combination).
4. Execute iteratively; measure outcomes; adapt.

Representative categories and examples

• Basic Operations

  • Focus on user needs: realign work to explicit user/stakeholder needs; discover unmet needs.
  • Situational awareness: build a common language with maps; reduce cross‑functional misalignment.
  • Effective & efficient: remove bias/duplication; use appropriate methods; savings can be dramatic.
  • Structure & culture: adopt cell/PST structures; enable autonomy and mastery.
  • Optimising flow: improve risk, information, performance, and financial flow.

• User Perception

  • Education: overcome user inertia with clear explanation and proof.
  • Bundling: hide a disadvantageous change among many changes.
  • Fear, uncertainty and doubt: slow rivals by amplifying risk perceptions.
  • Confusion of choice: overwhelm comparison to impede rational selection.
  • Artificial competition / creating artificial needs / lobbying: shape perception, policy, or market narratives.

• Accelerators

  • Market enablement: create comparators/platforms that foster competition.
  • Open approaches: use open source, open data/APIs/standards to grow the pie and shift competition.

• Ecosystem

  • Alliances, co‑creation: work with partners and users to drive evolution.
  • Sensing engines (ILC): use consumption data to detect future success.
  • Tower and moat: dominate a future position and deny differentials around it.

• Competitor

  • Tech drops, fragmentation, reinforcing inertia, misdirection, restriction, talent raid: shape rivals’ options and adaptability.

• Positional

  • Land grab, first mover, fast follower, weak signal: time your moves relative to evolution and market shifts.

• Poison

  • Licensing, insertion, design to fail: constrain future moves or poison unattractive spaces.

Mapping guidance

• Ground every play in a current map of your landscape.
• Match methods to evolution (agile for novel/uncertain, lean for product, six sigma for commodity).
• Combine plays; sequences often matter more than single moves.
• Expect coevolution of practice—update practices as components evolve.
• Reinforce with Doctrine (common language, remove bias/duplication, challenge assumptions).

Key insights

1. Gameplays are context‑specific; mapping makes the context explicit.
2. Combinations of small, iterative plays often outperform one “big bet.”
3. User needs and situational awareness are the anchor for selecting plays.
4. Ecosystems and openness can accelerate evolution and advantage.
5. Education reduces inertia; misdirection and perception plays exist—use responsibly.

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See also: Doctrine, Coevolution of Practice, Value Chain, and ILC.