A Case for Three Types of Inertia and Constraint on a Wardley Map
CONTENT WARNING: This post assumes familiarity and experience and gets into the weeds of symbols used on a Wardley Map. It may not be the easiest read if you’re new to Wardley Mapping.
On a contemporary Wardley Map, there’s typically one type of Inertia and one type of Constraint. Inertia is usually depicted inhibiting the evolutionary flow, and Constraint is usually depicted inhibiting the capital flow. While attempting to represent these in code, I ended up in a place where I now think that there are three types of Inertia and Constraint, one for each of: evolutionary flow, capital flow, and capital stock.
While working on a new Mapkeep prototype, I found that I needed to unambiguously specify how to represent Inertia and Constraints on a Wardley Map. In contemporary Wardley Mapping, an Inertia is a resistance to change that resists an evolutionary flow. It is usually depicted as solid vertical bars, typically on an evolutionary stage boundary. On the other hand, a Constraint on a Wardley Map is a constraint on a specific capital flow (link) between two stocks of capital (components). Constraint is usually depicted as a thicker connecting line between components on a map.
During the course of designing a computer representation for these, I started to consider Constraint as a sort of Inertia but on capital flow. Ultimately, this equivalence did not work out, but while thinking about it, it sparked an exploration that resulted in the three proposed types.
For a moment, assume that Constraint is the same as Inertia. What this would mean is that on a Wardley Map, when Inertia resists evolutionary flow it is called Inertia, and when Inertia resists capital flow it is called Constraint. An immediate question following this assumption is whether Inertia extends to other things on a map, which leads to the idea of Inertia on the stock of capital. This is how we end up with three types of Inertia, one for each of: evolutionary flow, capital flow, and capital stock.
Exploring the idea of three Inertias for a while resulted in consideration of the difference between Inertia and Constraint. Are they really the same? I think the relevant difference here is that Inertia can be thought of as resistance to change coming from within/internal-to a thing, whereas Constraint can be thought of as resistance to change coming from without/external-to a thing. So, with this distinction in mind, Constraint and Inertia are not the same and Constraint is not Inertia by another name.
Nevertheless, while getting some clarity on Constraint and Inertia difference, there was still the question of whether Constraint or Inertia applied to all three of: evolutionary flow, capital flow, and capital stock. And, I think they do. Here are some hypothetical examples:
- Evolutionary Flow Inertia (movement): A company with a successful product is unable to change its operating structure to pursue low margin utility evolution of the product.
- Capital Flow Inertia (links): All software system components must use AWS by default as a matter of policy and using another provider requires effort and justification.
- Capital Stock Inertia (components): A complex software subsystem that nobody knows how it works, nobody is sure where the source code is, but a lot of transactions are going through it right now.
- Evolutionary Flow Constraint (movement): Government regulation or cartel preventing a company evolving its offering into a product or utility.
- Capital Flow Constraint (links): Our website software only runs on Windows machines.
- Capital Stock Constraint (components): We have only 100 GPUs to work with.
What would they look like?
I’m thinking that if Inertia and Constraint would apply to multiple map components, then they’d have to be somewhat distinct. My current thinking is that Inertia retains its solid black bar look while Constraint looks like a caution stripe.
Is this useful? I’m not sure. Perhaps having the additional clarity on internal vs external causes of resistance may be helpful. Perhaps specifying them on a map is helpful, but not sure.
