Wardley Mapping is a strategic tool that emphasizes situational awareness (SA) to inform decision-making.
It turns out that the core concept of Wardley Mapping, high situational awareness, is not as sound as many think. In the best case, it might be a weakness of the existing research, in the worst case - it can might be reduced to a simple 'just be successful'.
The meta-analysis by Bakdash et al. (2021) challenges the assumption that SA is a strong predictor of performance.
The study analyzed 678 effects from 77 papers and found that the overall mean effect size between SA and performance was modest (r = 0.26), with significant variability among individual effects. However, what is more important, several researchers have also critiqued the concept of situational awareness (SA) for its potential circularity, leading to a situation where successful people have high situational awareness, and those less successful have not.
Flach (1995) highlighted the risk of defining SA in a way that makes it both the cause and effect of performance outcomes, leading to tautological reasoning.
Dekker and Hollnagel (2004) further argued that SA often functions as a "folk model," overgeneralized and resistant to falsification, which undermines its scientific rigor.
These critiques suggest that without precise definitions and measurements, SA can become a self-referential concept, complicating its application in research and practice, and even if it is somehow measured, it does not have a very strong impact on performance.
Does it mean that Wardley Mapping is not useful?
Not really, I have seen it applied and I have applied it many times to drive extraordinary results, and this is hard to ignore. There is quite a crowd of people happy with wardley mapping and applying it for their jobs.
But questions need to be asked - what is the really driving value for adopters?
Communication method? Time spent talking about the challenge? Preselected economic knowledge? Patterns? 🤷
So many questions!
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