Sep 17, 2022DoctrineA Statement of Official Policy — As I mentioned previously, the full description of Wardley Mapping is beyond the scope of this series, however I want to highlight some aspects as noteworthy in the context of onboarding. One of these aspects is Wardley Doctrine, which Simon Wardley defines as the basic universal principles that are applicable…4 min read4 min read
Sep 11, 2022Wardley MappingTopographical Intelligence for Business When Simon Wardley was a CEO he set out to find effective ways of doing business strategy. Finding none, he ended up creating his own way of doing business strategy that is grounded in lots of other peoples’ work. Wardley Mapping is a synthesis resulting in…5 min read5 min read
Jan 5, 2022The Wardley GraphA Non-Euclidean Wardley Map Embedding In Semantic Spacetime — Every Wardley mapper quickly learns the difference between graphs and maps: the space on a map has meaning, whereas space on a graph has none. Another way of framing this is that a Wardley Map is a Euclidean embedding (information is projected onto a Euclidean space, a vertical and horizontal…Wardley Maps13 min readWardley Maps13 min read
Dec 22, 2021NFTs Through a Hohfeldian LensA Simplistic Summary — In a 1913 essay “Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning”, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld outlined what seems very much like a Promise Theoretic approach to judicial reasoning regarding interest in property. Hohfeld distinguishes the jural concepts of Right, Duty, Privilege, No-Right, Power, Liability, Disability, and Immunity.Nft3 min readNft3 min read
Mar 30, 2021Finite and Infinite GamesA Useful Reference Frame — There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Finite games are those instrumental activities — from sports to politics to wars — in which the participants obey…3 min read3 min read
Mar 25, 2021Metaphors We Live ByThis Is Water — Metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.”¹ George Lakoff and Mark Johnsen in their 2003 book “Metaphors We Live By” propose that human thought processes are largely metaphorical. Once I was…Metaphor4 min readMetaphor4 min read
Mar 24, 2021How Complex Systems FailComplacency and the Clear/Chaotic boundary — We live in A Complex World. We are surrounded by complex systems. In this post I will take a moment to highlight how complex systems fail. My colleague Jason Koppe shared a great summary in a tweet anticipating this post, linking to Richard Cook’s how.complexsystems.fail. The website above is…Complexity4 min readComplexity4 min read
Mar 20, 2021ExcessionBlack Swans and Turkey Problems — The concept of the Black Swan was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book by the same name. Over many introductions of this concept to friends and colleagues, I observed that it is an easy concept to describe but a difficult one to grasp. Unknown Unknown Perhaps you’ve heard the…4 min read4 min read
Mar 18, 2021AporiaWhat to Do When in Doubt — In a previous post on complexity, I highlighted Liz Keogh’s shortcut for complexity estimation in order to quickly figure out the complexity of the system. …4 min read4 min read
Mar 12, 2021Economy of ThoughtComplexity is Expensive — This is the third post on defining complexity in the onboarding series. I highlighted before that, in a complex system, the relationship between cause and effect is knowable only in hindsight. Additionally, our constraints will change on the timescale under consideration. A sense-making heuristic is to probe-sense-respond using exaptive practices…3 min read3 min read
