We recently worked with a national government agency on those problems. They felt disoriented by the speed by which they were being overtaken by technological developments.

This agency operates in a specific corner of the education space. The public service they provide is important for society, but could conceivably also be provided by the private sector – though there are good arguments for why this ought to be a government task.

Unusually for a government entity, they are competing with private providers. This meant that the organization would, over time, lose its mandate, if it did not manage to use technology appropriately and offer these services to the standard that their clients have come to expect.

We worked with a small team of government officials on a short project of just a few weeks to help them decide on their tech strategy.

To do this we used Wardley Maps, a method developed by Simon Wardley. His maps are a way of anticipating change and discovering useful strategies.

The agency found the results compelling. And because what we did was useful and straightforward at the same time, we felt that by sharing what we did others might benefit too.

First, let’s get three quick disclaimers out of the way:

• We will inevitably gloss over important details. It’s impossible to pack in all the nuance and keep it readable at the same time.
• We are not naming the government entity. This means that the examples we can provide are unfortunately not as specific as you might hope.
• Finally, if you are not familiar with Wardley Mapping, we suggest more detailed readings at the end. It is a remarkably useful way of looking at the world, so any time spent understanding the method more deeply is time well spent.

With all that out of the way, how did we help this government entity make sense of technological change?

1. First we drafted a (Wardley) map of what they do. This helped us ground all subsequent discussions in the specific details of their operation.
2. With that map in hand, we looked at where technological developments, such as Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g. GPT-4 or Claude 3), would impact their business.
3. Lastly, since we now had an agreed upon description of what they were doing and how technology would influence their operation, we discussed what they could and should do about it.

Let’s look at each of these steps in turn.

Step 1: Mapping the business

The first step was to draw a map of what the agency does, i.e. of the service it provides. We did this over the course of three two-hour sessions, together with a small working group of executives.

This map grounded all subsequent discussions over the impact of technology on the agency’s business, as described by the executives themselves.

In between the sessions we would clean up the maps, so that we would have a tidy basis for our next discussion.

This first step happened over the course of a few weeks. We could have gone faster and done it within a week or less, if required. Refining the maps over the course of several sessions helped everyone get comfortable with the method and, more importantly, what the map meant.

The aim was not to draw a perfect map. Like with any map, we wanted to hit the right level of abstraction. All we needed was an artifact we could use to guide our discussions.

 

Quick interlude: You are looking at an (anonymized) Wardley Map. The general idea is this: The map shows the value chain of the business. The chains are made up of components. Each component depends on those below.

The vertical axis shows visibility to an end user. The higher up a component, the more visible it is to the user.

The horizontal axis plots the evolutionary state of each component. The basic claim is that under conditions of competition, components evolve from genesis to custom-built, from there to product/rental and finally to commodity.

See the recommended readings below for more detailed introductions to Wardley Mapping.

Step 2: Identifying the impact of technology

Now that we had a map the group felt was a good enough representation of their activities, we turned to the impact different technologies would have.

We took a list of key technological shifts they were interested in (think LLMs, robotics, blockchain, etc.), looked at each one in turn and asked “where and how will this impact your business?”.

This meant doing two things:

First, in many instances we already had an intuition where, for example, LLMs would impact the business. We then used the map to pinpoint the specific component that would be affected. This grounded everyone’s intuition and translated arguments into a shared, visual language.

Second, we went through every component on the map and asked how LLMs (or any of the other technologies on the list) might conceivably impact that element. This way we were sure not to overlook an important effect.

As a result of these two exercises it quickly became apparent that LLMs were in all likelihood going to have a major impact on the agency. They would affect a large number of central components in the value chain. Virtual Reality, on the other hand, would only impact a minor, non-strategic element in the value chain.

The group quickly gained clarity on where it was worth spending time debating potential consequences of technological shifts and where we could safely move on. Because the maps helped anchor all conversations in the organization’s operational reality, we avoided spending lots of time debating questions that would have ultimately no business impact.

Step 3: Making strategic choices

With the elements above in hand, we turned to strategy.

Depending on where on the map technology was impacting components, different responses were needed.

If the component in question was relatively mature (i.e. existing on the right-hand side of the map) this implied the organization needed to react quickly, follow “best practice” and make use of what the market had decided was the winning solution. In other words: there was nothing left to explore or figure out, the organization needed to get with the program and catch up as quickly as possible.

If the components where change was happening were placed in the middle of the map, there might be space to shape what would happen. This is where the organization could make a difference with shrewd, strategic moves.

If, lastly, the components affected by technological change were less evolved (i.e. towards the left-hand side of the map) this meant that there would be a lot of uncertainty around how the future would unfold and therefore a lot of room for exploration. Given the limited resources of the agency we felt that investments here would be too risky. Better to keep a watching brief and, given the considerable amounts of inertia in the environment, not worry about those components too much in the short term.