Reframing strategy for the digital era

Context snapshot

Domain: Strategy design and deployment

Focus: Wardley Mapping applied to modern, tech-enabled strategy

Formats:

• Public training

• Public training via O’Reilly Media

• Private training cohorts with Government Digital Services (GDS)

• Scenario planning for a consultancy exploring digital currency expansion

Strategic challenge: Designing strategy fit for digital-era complexity and execution

Executive tension

How organisations do strategy has not fundamentally changed in decades.

Many of the most commonly used strategy tools — SWOT, PESTEL, BCG Matrix, Porter — pre-date digital, platforms, and software-driven business models. They were not designed for environments shaped by fast-evolving technology, complex value chains, and constant recomposition.

As a result, leaders face a growing tension:

• Strategies feel abstract and disconnected from execution

• Inside-out capability plans are weakly linked to outside-in market reality

• Innovation is pursued without resolving underlying constraints

• Traditional businesses become complacent and exposed to disruptive digital players

In a world where business advantage increasingly depends on understanding technological evolution and positioning, traditional strategy tools struggle to keep up.

Reframing the problem

Modern strategy requires a different approach — not just new language, but new ways of seeing.

In tech-underpinned businesses, effective strategy depends on balancing two forces:

• Resolving current constraints that limit performance

• Exploring new ground that enables future advantage

To do this well, strategy must connect:

• Outside-in context: markets, users, competitors, technology evolution

• Inside-out capability: value chains, teams, platforms, and investment choices

Most strategy tools focus on one side or the other — but rarely both at the same time.

What was missing was a way to see the landscape, understand where the organisation truly sits within it, and reason explicitly about movement, trade-offs, and sequencing.

Our approach

We use Wardley Maps because they are designed to do exactly this.

Maps place the organisation in its industry context and connect business outcomes directly to the value chains that support them. They make dependencies, constraints, and evolution visible — and therefore discussable.

While the wider Wardley Mapping movement has grown rapidly, sometimes with cult-like characteristics, our approach is deliberately pragmatic. We are not interested in doctrine or mythology.

We focus on using maps as a practical business tool.

Our approach to strategy includes:

• Learning to map real business landscapes and recognise recurring patterns in digital strategy

• Starting from where the organisation actually is — not executive aspiration — and identifying the capability shifts required to support strategic intent

• Teaching people to map for themselves: even in introductory training, participants produce maps and learn how to reason with position and movement

• Exploring strategic plays by creating movement in value chains, explicitly linking inside-out change to outside-in opportunity

• Reframing strategy deployment so that more of the system — not just a planning function — is focused on realising business outcomes, rather than translating strategy into static execution plans

Across public and private settings, the emphasis is always on practice, insight, and decision-making — not theory.

Evidence of movement

This approach consistently challenges traditional strategy assumptions, particularly where strategy is weakly connected to execution.

Whether in public training, in-house cohorts, or live scenario work, participants report seeing their business landscape differently — often for the first time. Maps expose blind spots, surface hidden constraints, and reveal opportunities that were previously obscured by abstract frameworks.

In practical settings:

• Teams identify clearer strategic options and trade-offs

• Leaders gain a shared language to discuss strategy, capability, and sequencing

• Strategy conversations shift from opinion-driven debate to evidence-based reasoning

• Breakthrough ideas emerge that reconnect strategy to action

The result is not a “better strategy document”, but better strategic decisions.

Inviting your reflection

Are you still shaping strategy in a digital, tech-driven world using tools designed 10–20 years before digital became dominant?

And if so — what might change if you could see your business landscape more clearly, reason about movement explicitly, and connect strategy directly to execution?

If you are ready to look at strategy differently, new tools may not give you the answers — but they may help you ask better questions.