Aligning Value Chains - Patterns of Digital Strategy using Wardley Maps

Most organisations don’t fail because they choose the “wrong strategy.” They fail because their value chains can’t execute the strategy they’ve chosen — let alone adapt when the landscape shifts.

In this next session of our Patterns of Digital Strategy series, we explore Aligning Value Chains: the discipline of shaping a change strategy (the inside-out strategy) alongside the business strategy (the outside-in strategy).In a world where markets evolve faster than planning cycles, competitive advantage comes less from brilliant positioning and more from strategic agility — the ability for value chains to sense, adapt, and flow. Yet many organisations still operate with a 1.0 mental model of strategy: branding, the 4Ps, cascaded directives, and heavy plans designed to “bring the strategy home.” They polish the narrative while remaining blind to the architecture of how value is actually created and delivered.

The result is predictable:

• Endless strategy rewrites

• Chronic execution failure

• Zero…