I've recently become acquainted with a management technique called Wardley Mapping, which is used to assess business landscapes. Quoting from hiredthought.com:
A Wardley Map is a representation of the landscape in which a business (or anything, really) operates. It consists of a value chain (activities needed to fulfill user needs) graphed against evolution (a measure of how individual activities change over time under supply and demand competition).
Due to my knowledge and experience with personal development frameworks, and particularly when seeing the approach could be used to assess Practices, through the evolution from Novel to Best, I tried the exercise of mapping out a lot of what I write about in my blog and by consequence the things I value.
For the past year, as I opened my own business and decided to tackle some knowledge gaps I felt I need to close to be successful and the coming of a second child, I lost many of the good habits I had up until late 2017. And I've been feeling that something is off in my balance, but couldn't completely put my finger in it until I've mapped this out.
Now, I can't say any of this caught me completely off guard, but this mapping allowed me to get a better understanding of why I'm feeling unbalanced.
If I just mindlessly (as opposed to mindfully) let myself cruise through life, 3 things are going to happen:
- I'm going to be living in my head (in yellow), with my only good practices being acquiring knowledge
- I'm going to eat like crap and not exercise (in purple)
- I'll going to let comfort stuff creep back into my life (blue)
I'm happy with none of those, so this tells the things I need to work on if I want to be who I said I'd be.
The other interesting insight, is that I'm clearly hiding behind the acquisition of more knowledge and not producing the security and philosophy blogging that I so value (in red).
The great news is that seeing it this way, tells me ONE thing I can easily do in order to become more balanced.
Stopwatch on learning time everyday, and the waking hours I get from it, I need to find a way to work on my other goals. I may develop this idea further into an actual framework for personal development using Wardley Mapping concepts as basis, and Stoicism as the underlying doctrine, but at the very least and knowing how cryptic some of my communications are, I may use maps like these in the future to position the message I'm talking about and the type of movement I'm trying to discuss.
Happy to hear thoughts about applying Wardley mapping techniques for personal development.
Mario, this is amazing! I honestly never thought how this concept could apply to self discovery/development but it can and it seems so simple now! A few questions: what is the significance of the bars you have next to some of the bullets? and I dont think I see any indication of where you would like to see the bullet in an idea world, right?
ReplyDeletehi there. apologies for only seeing this post now, but for some reason missed the notification. So the bars represent my own inertia to getting that part of my life sorted (ie how ingrained are bad behaviours or apathy in that particular goal). Understanding different levels of inertia and thinking how they stack against each other is kind of helpful, as it's been allowing me so far focusing mainly on the things which I have less inertia to, the theory being that movement will provide momentum and decrease inertia in the other areas. but my experience this month is telling me it's a double edged sword, need to blog about it :)
ReplyDeletealso, I haven't "decided" where the bullet should be because my gut tells me I wouldn't have time in the day to make everything "Best" unless I'm kidding myself about what "Best" means. But I have created a spreadsheet where I defined some metrics per domain. For instance, training and jiujitsu are defined as Best starting at 3 times a week (so I have room to "sprint" if needed) but in Yoga, best starts at 4.
ReplyDelete