Wardley Mapping: Designing Epistemically Healthy Organizations

Remote workshop
Ben Mosior and Jabe Bloom

  How to Read a Wardley Map
by Ben Mosior

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


Systems that are too big to be understood inhibit their own maintainability and long-term sustainment.

Because they are not “knowable,” they reproduce vague, lengthy decision-making, and conditions for conflict resolution that require the use of authority. As a result, contextual organizational knowledge rarely finds its way to the point of decision, and intuition and luck, or escalation and distant decisions are the defaults.

Smaller systems, on the other hand, are knowable. By virtue of their size, they require a lower cognitive load to conceptualize, which makes them easier to imagine in different uses and configurations. Hierarchical power less often needs to be the basis for decisions, since the system facilitates the right discussions in the moment by virtue of being disposed to understandability. But being small is not enough — we also need coherence with a bigger picture. In other words, we need to also imagine the parts in context of a whole.

Creating small socio-technical systems, capable of peer-level negotiation is one option for moving forward.

Join Ben Mosior and Jabe Bloom in a domain-based exploration of socio-technical design through the lens of Wardley Mapping. Together we will come to understand the systems of which we are already a part — to untangle them so as to imagine how we might better define them and make them smaller. We’ll also situate those systems in a larger structure of strategic intent. In doing so, we aim to design systems we can care about and care for.

Is this for you?

This workshop is for anybody who is interested in strategy and mapping, no background required.

Testimonial

Post Workshop Blogpost, by Tony Sinclair: https://www.tobysinclair.com/post/learning-journal-wardley-mapping-ben-mosior-and-jabe-bloom-designing-healthy-organisations

Ben Mosior

About Ben Mosior

Principal, Hired Thought

Ben is your friendly methodology whisperer, developing innovative new methods into everyday tools and facilitating learning experiences for teams and communities. Through Hired Thought, Ben shares decision-making and sensemaking approaches oriented around collective knowledge creation. To democratize access to strategic thinking methods, he operates LearnWardleyMapping.com and runs regular events to inform and uplift new practitioners. Ben's goal in work and life is to do his part to enable purposeful systems to flourish. He podcasts for joy and teaches for hope.

All workshops by Ben Mosior
@HiredThought
Jabe Bloom

About Jabe Bloom

Jabe specializes in helping groups embrace and leverage uncertainty, ambiguity and optionality. The rewards of allowing teams and individuals to discover and leverage their innate creative potential are worth the risks and challenges involved in holding open a space for innovation and creativity.

Jabe’s deep practical experience, constant exploration via action research, and extensive theoretical investigations inform his public speaking and provide a foundation for his active engagement with colleagues, executives and entrepreneurs. He helps clients to clarify vague understandings of the problems they’ve noticed with their processes and products, learn to perceive and understand the causes of those problems for themselves, and make plans to act in order to create more effective environments and systems for collaborative work. He help clients find a mindful way of working that enables their teams to continuously adapt their processes and products in an ever shifting business environment.

He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon University focusing on Transition Design. He is a go-to source for insights into improving organizational tempo, resilience and performance by transforming dynamics within the co-evolving interdependencies of management, design, development and operational practices.

All workshops by Jabe Bloom
@cyetain

No dates are scheduled for this workshop. Let us know if you think we should organize it near you, or if you'd like to book it on premise in your organisation.


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