1 Sketch your enterprise on a napkin
A Milky Way enterprise map is designed to provide a shared reference for visualising (parts of) an enterprise. It locates enterprise elements such as teams, projects or resources, and the steps taken to product creation and delivery. One single geography is introduced to explore the interplay of its constituent elements, and to co-create and influence its evolution.
The goal of establishing such a map is immediate recognition and shared understanding through visual communication. This relies on broad adoption and reuse, across teams, topics, domains and enterprise challenges. It has humble beginnings: a first version is usually a simple sketch to be shared, starting with people around you. From there, over time and through sharing and reuse, you will start to establish the map as a common way to depict what’s going on, and what to consider changing.
To get started, we include only people as a base element, making the first version of our Milky Way map a variant of a people map (or stakeholder map). More enterprise elements follow in the next chapter.
Practical tips
Tips | Why |
|---|---|
Start where it’s easy | Your first Milky Way map will serve to respond to a certain challenge, tackled by specific people within a certain area. Start mapping where it is most easy for the group. Depict the parts of your enterprise relevant to this challenge in context of the overall core story, and allow for gaps to be explored later. Shared meaning and comprehension will grow over time as you use and develop the map in conversations. |
Visualise the whole | In order to enable the benefits of instant recognition and a shared spatial mental model of the enterprise, the geography must be as complete as possible from the start. Rather than depicting only people directly relevant to your challenge, position them on the map of the whole enterprise as the larger context for your story. |
Locate yourself on the map | Include your own (or your client’s) role that plays out in the story the map is telling. Then look around you, and place those you work with directly or indirectly, your customers or other key actors to include. Pay particular attention to where urgent or important challenges seem to sit. Develop the story further, with people involved in or affected by your work. |
Build a scenario | Ask yourself what happens before and after you and your peers come into the story. Consider what is needed as an input or what comes out as an output of your activity. Where does it all begin, and what is the end of your story? This way your map starts depicting a step by step scenario of the enterprise in motion, moving through the story cycle, again and again. |
Go with the flow | As you create the map and unfold your story, follow the processes and journeys you know, from strategy to product creation, delivery and support, learning and innovation. This allows you to spot gaps and add missing actors, and to find the general direction of interaction and collaboration. |
Make space for the unknown | Use a light sketch-like depiction or sticky notes to communicate the preliminary nature of a new Milky Way map. As your story unfolds, you’ll uncover people and areas of your enterprise that you aren’t familiar with. There might be people that are considered “far away” or irrelevant for your current challenge. Adding new “continents” later will reshape the map and require learning a changed geography. Therefore even areas deemed out of scope for your challenge should appear on the map, without going into details. |
Tell your Core Story
In order to obtain a geography there needs to be a common reference, or anchor, just like the compass pointing North in a map of a piece of land. In a Milky Way map, this anchor is your Core Story: a cyclic step sequence of what your enterprise does, again and again.
In the very centre of a Milky Way map, you'll find the Core Story depicted as an circular loop broken down into a sequence of steps, with an open gap depicted at the bottom to pause and reflect between cycles.
Instead of a linear scenario such as a vision, a roadmap, a customer journey or a process, this story tells about the repetitive nature of the business on a circle: what is the pulse, what is happening again and again? This story is not adhering to a specific timeline, but a general reference of the stages the your enterprise goes through.
To depict the Core Story, we are lining up these steps in an open circle to give map users a mental model of the cyclic nature of their enterprise’s activity. Instead of adding labels, consider using icons or sketches to depict what’s going on.
For many businesses, this involves steps such as:
💡We come up with ideas and plans.
🏭 We build infrastructure and productions capacity.
🧑🤝🧑 We establish relationships to customers and other important people.
🚚 We run operations for ongoing delivery of products and services.
💲We collect payment from customers and handle financial transactions.
📊 We follow up with analytics and business intelligence to improve.
Depending on your enterprise’s sector, the steps and their sequence can be different.
This cycle has an obvious feedback loop built in to reflect organisational learning and iterating, and a moment of pause and reflection in between cycles positioned at the bottom. Once a cycle is completed, the enterprise starts a new one doing it all over again.
Should you make one or multiple maps for your enterprise? It depends. A Milky Way map is a tool to create a shared sense of “where”, so the map should depict “the enterprise”. Establishing multiple independent Core Stories counteracts the very reason to introduce a Milky Way map: show how things are working together, enable recognition, and thereby help facilitate informed conversations and shared understanding. That said, if there are independent businesses under one roof that only rarely converse and collaborate, such as a holding or several government departments, multiple different maps can make sense.
Build your geography
Just like North pointing upwards being a randomly selected convention in geographical maps, the Core Story is primarily a convention, only used to establish a geography for the enterprise.
Consequently, a good Core Story needs to resonate with people co-creating and working with the map and help establish a sense of “where things are”, rather than trying to reflect an absolute truth about which step “comes first” when depicting the enterprise as a process.
To bring your Core Story to life, we add people, using the most common label or name shared by the co-creators and audiences of our map, such as role or team names, the activities or jobs they do, or customer segments. These are people that play an important part in your story as the enterprise goes after its ambition, and should therefore be featured on the enterprise map. Using the Core Story as an anchor, position them on the map:
Most enterprises can easily differentiate between internal and external people in their Core Story.
Internal teams: people that play roles and organise in groups, that work for the enterprise. In most enterprises this corresponds to staff members employed by the organisation, but this can also extend to project teams, communities of practice, or even partners playing a key role the enterprise. Find a suitable term to label these people across the cycle, such as their team names or what activity they are accountable for. Teams in a typical commercial business might include:
Bottom left: Teams that do research, develop products or platforms, and source assets required.
Top left: Teams that establish customer relationships, market and sell products.
Top right: Teams that run operations, deliver products and support customers.
Bottom right: Teams that analyse results, enable organisational learning and plan ahead.
In the bottom centre gap, place teams that support others, in between cycles or over the whole cycle.
External actors: people your enterprise addresses and interacts with. They usually are individuals or other enterprises engaged in some interaction with the enterprise, depending on the sector and business model. For a commercial enterprise, this might include:
Bottom left: People that support building up the enterprise, such as investors, candidates or suppliers.
Top: People that benefit from or support delivering the enterprise’s products. Note that usually customers are in focus, but your story could also include other people like sales partners.
Bottom right: People that are involved in learning from a completed cycle and preparing for the next one, such as authorities or strategic partners.
Note that the right place to place people, for internal and external alike, is where they appear and fit in your Core Story. There is no correct or incorrect placement, just a compelling and convincing story to be told. If you discover missing steps or a better order, do not hesitate to change your Core Story accordingly – at this stage, your map is still a sketch on a napkin.
Who to include, who is internal and who is external? This is sometimes less obvious than it seems. For platform businesses or networks of organisations, people that aren’t employed might best be mapped as internal teams. On the other hand, sometimes a single department might be best mapped as an independent enterprise, making other employees of the same legal entity external actors. As before, what defines the enterprise boundaries and who is who depends on the Core Story you want to tell, and what makes sense to the audience you try to reach with your map.
When naming people on your map, make sure it’s clear who to talk to to find out more about that map area. Use labels that explain the nature of the relationship, and the activities and interests. Avoid generic names or jargon that might be difficult to understand or relate to for your audience.
Sketch your draft flow
With the Core Story defined and the people placed on the map, it’s time to “press play”. How does your story go? Here we map the interactions between the people as Flow relations (arrows).
This example shows a Milky Way map after multiple sessions with people involved in a specific design challenge at Intersection Railways: improving collaboration between teams maintaining our infrastructure and those working on the train schedule.
A Milky Way map is developed in an iterative and collaborative fashion. The map maker presents their first attempt at a geography pointing out that this is a draft, and potentially wrong. A sketch-like “napkin” depiction, or using sticky notes, can help communicating this to co-creators.
Using inputs from many people on the map, the Core Story is gradually revised and refined, and people are re-positioned for a more coherent and compelling story. After many conversations, this example uses just four steps to build up the geography:
🛤️🚉 We plan, build and maintain our railway infrastructure.
🧑🤝🧑📱 We develop and market our products to (potential) customers.
🚆📦 We operate passenger and freight trains.
🔎📊 We learn through analytics and research, and invest.
We map who is directly involved, who comes in before and after, and who we rely on between cycles, until we get a full story cycle – even though the selection of people is still incomplete. People that enable or guide, or are otherwise involved along the entire story, are positioned in the gap at the bottom of the map.
Where to position people on the map? Where they appear in your story! Positioning is a visual storytelling choice rather than an exact science.
Make people appear where they have a significant role in the story, and where they interact with others.
Interactions with external people will naturally move some internal people to the outskirts of the map, depicting their customer-facing or otherwise representative role.
Initially the same people may appear multiple times on the map – if they are involved in many places, consider moving them into the gap between cycles, at the bottom of the map.
Is is no coincidence that this map seems more “crowded” on the left hand side: this focus is related to the challenge chosen to introduce the first map, likely to introduce more changes to the first and second steps of this Core Story. Given the focus of the team making this initial map, they will easily spot people directly involved in or affected by changes to the way communication happens between areas today.
On the right side we see fewer people with more generic and high level labels. Including them on the map allows our map making team to consider consequences of changes as the story unfolds, trace the impact of their work and spot dependencies with people not immediately on their radar.
As an example, some interesting indicators potentially directly informing design decisions, such as competitive response times to operational issues, might be generated by insights from the Market Analytics team - even though this people is considered “far away” from the heart of the envisioned changes, towards the end of the story.
What is the right number and order of steps in your Core Story? In reality the major steps often correspond to the perceived major areas, or silos, of the enterprise. By reproducing this mental model the map becomes easily relatable for people seeing it the first time.
At the same time, making them part of one story is an attempt to tear down the walls and expose the interactions and dependencies between them. As a rule of thumb, 4-7 steps is usually a good number to build up your geography.
The sequence of steps can be obvious, but also sometimes tricky to decide when the enterprise runs multiple largely independent operations in parallel. As a reminder, the goal is not a “correct” order, but a compelling story: any step sequence that feels natural for most map users and helps stabilising the map’s geography is a good design choice. If there is no clear obvious order, simply go ahead and choose one.
Press play
Compared to a classic people or stakeholder map, a Milky Way map shows the enterprise in motion. Therefore the interactions between people are depicted as arrows (flow relations), following the general direction of the Core Story cycle. Mapping these flows brings the map to life and allows map users to imagine how people collaborate over time as the enterprise moves through the steps of the cycle, simply by following the arrows.
Internally, flows depict the collaboration between internal people, who communicates the results of their work to whom, who depends on input from others. The story shows processes and employee journeys, and can represent direct communication, handovers, or integrations between automated systems.
Mapping interactions with external people depict getting in touch with prospects and customers, but also other important people in the ecosystem such as candidates, partners or investors. They show moments of communication, transaction or collaboration across the perceived boundary of the enterprise, and help exploring the effect of changes on its competitive positioning.
Adding flows will undoubtedly challenge some of the initial positions of people on the map, making you move them to get shorter arrows. That’s a good thing, helping your map more accurately depict how people work together.
What snapshot should your Milky Way map show, the past, present or potential future? Start with the present, how things work today. Even with an incomplete picture, start marking changes to the present to explore potential future states.
Initially, these changes are limited in scale and impact on the map. Over time and with growing adoption, your future state Milky Way map can become a beacon for a portfolio of change initiatives across the enterprise.