2 Chart your galaxy of enterprise elements
With the first draft Milky Way sketch established and adopted, the map initially serves as a shared visual reference of collaboration and interaction: between people involved in building and running the enterprise, and those it strives to engage in the markets, such as customers or partners. With more and more people appearing along the Core Story, it starts resembling its namesake, our galaxy with millions of stars.
Similar to maps of our galaxy, the Milky Way depicts a dynamic system that is constantly in motion, only partially known or observable to the map makers. We see it from a specific vantage point – because our solar is system located inside one of its spiral arms, we simply cannot travel to a different location to get a better overview. Similarly, a Milky Way map will incorporate the perspective of its makers. We cannot include everything and everyone, and we have to make decisions on how to label and position what our map depicts as we cover more and more space.
But even with this incomplete and approximated view, people will start referring to specific locations on the map when considering scenarios of change and operational design. It enables mutual understanding and clear communications, starting with the first co-creators. It grows with each new contributor adding to it, challenging the geography to better depict what is actually going on in and around the enterprise.
To accelerate this process and benefit from the full potential of a shared geography, your map needs to relate to given challenges at hand. It is most effective if it can show what people care about when attempting to tackle challenges relevant to them. Ideally, you will take them on a voyage that transcends their many existing maps and charts. This is where the full palette of Enterprise Design Facets and Enterprise Elements comes in.
Practical tips
Tips | Why |
|---|---|
Start in familiar territory | It is easier to explore areas of the enterprise close to your or your client’s location as people on the map, closer to your familiar daily business. Reach out to people next to you, clarify any misconceptions or close knowledge gaps, then venture out further into the neighbourhood. |
Create custom views | Just like the map of a piece of land shows or hides certain elements, make multiple map views that depict relevant elements. This directly relates to the questions your audience is asking, and the design decisions they expect to take together. Reuse your map and add more views as you adopt the mapping technique over time and with different co-creators. |
Pick a priority challenge | While the Milky Way map is already useful as a visual guide to the enterprise, it shows its true power when it is customised to respond to a specific design challenge. Choose a widely shared change ambition or open question, and adapt what to show and what to hide on your map views using EDGY facets and elements. To clarify what users can expect to see, you can explicitly state this challenge on your map view. |
Use existing knowledge | Many elements potentially be depicted on your Milky Way map might already be available in other formats, such as capability or process maps, customer journey maps or mission and vision storytelling. Find documents people refer to, and build upon this existing documentation. |
Keep the big picture in sync with the details | A Milky Way map isn’t there to replace other models or maps, but to place their messages into context by depicting them in context of the larger enterprise. Keep technical or other details out of the Milky Way map, but keep them in sync at a high level with important models used in your enterprise. For example, reuse your major organisational teams, processes or customer journey steps from maps that are already available, used and maintained. |
Add context to tell the bigger story | Make sure your map focuses on one key facet, but enable continuous reframing and translating between them by adding other complimentary elements as context. Depending on your chosen challenges, your map might show organisational units that have certain capabilities or pursue certain purposes, or you might want to add products being delivered and customer tasks they serve. Depicting a filtered selection of additional relevant elements to provide context adds to the richness of conversations and to the quality of design decisions. |
Choose a mapping strategy
By giving people a navigation aid to the enterprise, the initial sketch of a rough Milky Way map is already useful by itself – but it’s just a start: different professional practices involved in enterprise change will continue to use their specific tools and models, such as product roadmaps, capability or process maps, journey maps or organisational charts - and have a hard time relate to each other.
How to make the Milky Way enterprise map respond to people’s specific challenges, and depict the enterprise from a perspective relevant to their practice areas, on top of the shared geography you just established?
By adding relevant enterprise elements to the map, we can address specific concerns, and explore their overlap and dependencies with other perspectives used within in our teams. This way, the Milky Way map becomes directly relevant to the questions, elements and dynamics your audience cares about.
Over time, multiple distinctive views on the same map, that prove useful to your audiences and their challenges, will help developing the benefit of a shared geography: through familiar positioning and visual clues, they will be able to read and interpret all views of the map, thereby facilitating shared understanding.
To get started, review and refine the Core Story to make explicit what is happening in each sector, and to clarify the background story your Milky Way map supports as a repeating cycle. Make it emotional: what is it that your enterprise does differently, what is its unique entrepreneurial ambition, what makes it tick? As you go through the scenario, adjust and develop the core story.
Moving forward, use this Core Story to outline a repeating scenario of what’s going on in the enterprise, again and again, as it goes through the cycle. Initially, focus on the current state of your enterprise, considering its future comes later. If it feels like your Core Story isn’t completely realised or true in today’s enterprise, that’s okay — this will illustrate the tension leading to change, which is what your map is designed to help with.
Use your napkin Milky Way map version as an input to run a workshop session with potential co-creators amongst all the people it depicts, in particular those that are easy for you to initially engage and work with. Then move to a bigger canvas and draw the base geography. Add placeholders for people and you want to engage or consider, when scouting for Outcomes they seek to achieve.
This is the basis for a more detailed map, ready for your co-creators to contribute to. Suitable tool support can be a large white board with sticky notes, physical or virtual, or a digital diagramming tool of your choice.
Complete your draft map together, and discuss areas that represent known issues or opportunities to look into, in order to scout for a specific challenge to tackle with your map. Ask your co-creators to share existing maps and models to take into account and potentially incorporate into the workshop.
Choosing a shared challenge to tackle will enable you to select a suitable mapping strategy. In this section, you’ll find three suitable approaches to select and add EDGY elements to your Milky Way map, corresponding to the Enterprise Design Facet initially in focus when starting the process. All focus on the Outcomes people are looking to pursue: organisational Purposes, personal Tasks, or operational Capabilities.
Start with Architecture: inside-out mapping strategy
Starting point question: “What do we do”?
Key enterprise element: Capability
Starting point: Enterprise or Business Architecture, Business Analysis, Operating Model or Organisation Design
Typical challenges:
Understanding and improving operational processes
Organisational developments such as better collaboration or structural changes
Rethinking the way products are developed, produced and delivered to customers
Consolidating and optimising the use of assets, such as IT applications or infrastructure
An inside-out mapping strategy is focused on the operational inner workings of the enterprise, depicting what is being done as the Core Story unfolds.
To populate your map, conduct working sessions with internal people on your map sketch that you identified as relevant to your chosen challenge, either being involved in or affected by the desired outcomes. Use information available in existing maps and models such as hierarchical capability maps, organisation charts or process models.
This mapping strategy corresponds to the original Milky Way mapping technique developed by Annika Klyver at IRM Sweden in the early 2010s, and subject to Cecilia Norden’s book “The Milky Way”. The main purpose of this mapping strategy is to navigate and accelerate organisational or process change, starting from the Architecture facet. In this chapter you’ll also find two alternative mapping strategies, starting from the Experience and Identity facets.
Ask them to describe what they do, and use the blue sticky note to add this information to the map, reusing the location to relate the capabilities in the Core Story. Depending on the language typically used in your organisation, it can be easier to call these sticky notes activities or processes.
In this example, the focus is on the top left part of the map, where Intersection Railways markets its services to customers, sells passenger tickets and freight routes, and manages the customer experience. Once a sector of the map starts feeling complete and isn’t changing much anymore with any iteration, remove the people and focus on the capabilities they have.
Then dig deeper: with the first few capabilities mapped, ask what information or other assets people require for their work, and who will use the outputs of their work. These exchanges can be mapped on your map as flow relationships between capabilities, depicted as arrows drawn between blue sticky notes. They show the enterprise in motion and depict the processes that make it work, rather than a static snapshot of its organisational structure. They also show how capabilities are lined up to ultimately combine human and other assets to make and deliver products, and realise the purpose of the enterprise.
This mapping activity will naturally expand beyond the initial scope of the challenge, and help spot dependencies upstream, as well as impact downstream. In this example, the team spotted Infrastructure planning as a key input to product management, and added the Customer service capability to follow up on a ticket sale.
After a few challenges and rounds of iteration, your map will cover most of what people consider “what the enterprise does” in terms of capabilities represented, even when some areas are left vague or incomplete. At this point, it makes sense to add the other outcome elements as the context for building up these capabilities:
The enterprise ambition: which purposes drive the selection of capabilities in each sector? Break the overall ambition down into distinct purposes, as the main considerations when designing what the enterprise can do - for each moment in time represented in the steps of your Core Story.
The benefits the enterprise creates: what tasks will the capabilities help people accomplish? Match capabilities with corresponding customer tasks (or those of other key people the enterprise serves), representing their journey as a sequence of tasks they need or want help with. Potential product opportunities are highlighted as a link between a task and the capability it serves directly.
Focus areas will shift as more and more change initiatives use the map to navigate “their” areas, naturally bridging any silos between teams by depicting the operational enterprise as one unique story. It shows the enterprise as a story and flow across capabilities, and in context of the enterprise’s purpose and people’s tasks.
Start with Experience: outside-in mapping strategy
Starting point question: “What do we know about them”?
Key enterprise element: Task
Starting point: User Research, Customer Experience, Product or Service Design, Branding, Innovation
Typical challenges:
Understanding, tracking and improving the customer journey, relationship and lifecycle
Removing organisational or operational gaps when serving customers or other key people
Identifying market opportunities for product innovation, discovery and development
Keeping up with market developments, obtaining user experience insight and informing product/service design and delivery
In some ways, an Outside-in mapping strategy is the opposite approach: instead of looking inward, we take the perspective of people we try to engage with and serve as an enterprise, and understand their demand in their terms. In most cases, this corresponds to our customer initially in focus in the story, understanding and mapping their experience, being served by the products your enterprise makes and delivers.
As a starting point, choose one or two external people that are concerned by the challenge you chose to tackle, and map out their experience or journeys as a flow of tasks. This should be directly informed by research insights about these people and their actual experiences, not simply views or opinions of the map makers.
Populate your map with a sequence of tasks along their journey of engaging with your enterprise, starting in the top left corner of your map:
What is the starting point of their journey? What is the situation, their need to be addressed?
When do people first encounter your enterprise and its products? What are they looking to do?
What makes them select a product (and an enterprise) to engage with? What will convince them?
What do they need to do with that product? What do they need to get done?
What happens if something goes wrong? What makes them recover?
What happens after? What would make them come back and redo the cycle?
This outside-in view on the enterprise following the customer journey helps teams to focus on the potential benefits created by the organisation and its products as a starting point, rather than the way it is operating and collaborating internally. The Core Story and its steps provides a grounding: in this example, the customer tasks correspond to the first two steps of our Story and can therefore be mapped to the corresponding map sectors:
In order to come up with interesting product offerings for specific trip ideas or business travel occasions, we have to build our shared infrastructure to be able to offer and serve relevant destinations, such as business or vacation hubs.
As passenger start their detailed planning, we appear in their journeys with travel products made available via channels for interactions and transactions to support their tasks, such as journey planning and reservation.
Note that business passengers might not do the booking themselves, so there could be other people involved.
For larger enterprises, mapping the customer experience can reveal a complex reality. There might be several customer segments with different tasks, or even different business models to consider - such as Intersection Railways' Passenger and Freight business lines. To make your Milky Way enterprise map show that complexity, you can add their tasks as separate “snakes”, from the initial need to getting in touch to completing their journey. The example below uses icons (labels) to differentiate these these customer segments.
Who is the customer? In many enterprises, the answer seems obvious: those who use (and pay for) our products. In other cases, it might be more difficult to determine. Examples for less straightforward configurations include public sector organisations serving citizens, other government entities or businesses, or multi-sided platform businesses where the divide between suppliers and customers becomes blurry. In some cases it makes sense to map the experience of investors, partners, suppliers or job candidates. There is only limited space on your map: focus on people that influence decisions when designing the enterprise to respond to your priority challenge, and that the audience of your map is interested in.
This mapping provides the basis to add other enterprise facets and elements as context:
What do we want to pursue as an enterprise, as customers go through their journeys? Add purposes that drive each step of your Core Story and help deal with trade-offs when making design decisions.
What do we do to make this happen? Add capabilities to show what needs to happen operationally as customers go through their journeys.
What must be done before customers appear in the story? Add capabilities that enable your enterprise to get ready, set things up to make its products and acquire and serve customers.
What capabilities are directly serving your customers? Position them closer to the top, aligned with the customer tasks they serve.
What happens after? Add learning and development capabilities after customers complete their journeys, to gain insight from their experiences.
Add general enablement and management capabilities at the bottom, in between cycles.
With more and more elements added, the Milky Way map will show a more complete picture, following your customer experience. This provides a reality check: how your enterprise realises its purpose and builds up operational capabilities to win markets and deliver value depends on the role it plays in the lives of these customers.
When using the map, highlighting a specific Moment in Time in your Core Story can help illustrate interdependencies and ongoing dynamics, with enterprise elements aligned to a “clock position” to inform design decisions.
From an outside-in perspective, we see that both passenger and freight customer journeys feature tasks of detailed planning and researching that need to be addressed by the enterprise. On the other hand, the stated purpose is to develop leading green travel products, as part of our Story to “Play to win in green mobility”. This could inspire a conversation when setting up marketing and product management capabilities:
How to enable environmentally conscious customers to optimise their environmental impact when performing these research and planning tasks?
Does this also apply to freight services and logistics companies seeking to reduce their environmental footprint, even though it’s not a “travel product”? Should this purpose be formulated more openly?
What are the implications for earlier steps in the scenario, such as the Trip ideas task or our Scheduling capability? What does this mean for later steps, such as the Booking task or our Sales capability?
Asking these “before and after” questions will enable you challenge a limited view on the customer experience, the internal operations and their interplay over time.
Start with Identity: ambition-driven mapping strategy
Starting point question: “What matters to us”?
Key enterprise element: Purpose
Starting point: Culture Change, Organisational Transformation, Branding and Communication
Typical challenges:
Clarifying our vision, strategy and overarching story to be communicated to people
Preparing a major transformation such as a change of business model or merger
Engaging employees (and/or partners) to understand their role in our enterprise story
Making team behaviour contribute to achieving our entrepreneurial ambition
The Milky Way enterprise map depicts a story of our enterprise in action, realising a shared ambition. The third mapping strategy in this chapter starts from that ambition: instead of our customer tasks, or capabilities needed to serve them, we initially focus on the purpose we go after as we go through the steps of our Core Story.
To get started, find out about the purposes the internal people on your napkin pursue. This can be found in content such as principles or values, vision or mission statements, goals or metrics, or elaborated co-creatively in workshop sessions. Focus on “why they are here”, what drives them as individuals, teams, and how their purposes contribute to realising the overall ambition of the enterprise.
Purpose, task or capability? In EDGY, all three are specialisations of the same base element: Outcome. When working with them on a combined map, there can be a lot of overlap leading to some confusion or discomfort. If the same words appear in all three facets, that might make co-creators uncomfortable: is this something we pursue, is it something we have to do, or something we personally want to achieve? Whenever people appear on your map, these questions are valid. However, this nuance makes all the difference when looking at enterprises applying the different facets. As your map evolves, this will become clearly visible in the way the elements interrelate and flow together on the map.
Diving into purposes can reveal many different ambitions. The example below investigates purposes stated as Intersection Railways learns from operations and interactions with customers - steps 3 and 4 of our Core Story. It might be the result of a series of workshops with a set of people who appear on the map, informed by a quick analysis of content relating to purpose and goals.
As you work with people and uncover purposes, you’ll get a sense of shared priorities and how they become part of one Core Story. No purpose exists in a vacuum: they depend on each other, and realising one influences how well you can realise others down the line. With that in mind, work on the flow of influence between the purposes you mapped. What purpose influences another one?
As with the other mapping strategies outlined before, this is when we can focus on ambition, expressed through a more detailed web of purposes being pursued, building on each other as your Core Story unfolds. Hiding the people, we can explore how aligned the purposes are by themselves, and how much this reveals an overall ambition of the enterprise.
What level of purposes should appear on your map? Organisations habitually maintain goals and purposes at many levels, from high level ecosystem and strategy down to team and role specific purposes. In this mapping strategy, we source purposes from leaders and teams that appear in the Core Story, consequently aiming for medium-to-low level purposes without getting into purely tactical performance goals. Then, by looking at the map as whole over the course of the Core Story, we gain visibility into more high-level purposes by asking what they might achieve together. This will reveal gaps between purposes communicated and those actually being pursued by people.
The example below shows a more complete picture of how the various purposes uncovered build on each other – read the arrows as “realising this contributes to realising…”, similar to Cause-and-Effect Diagrams or Outcome Maps. These influencing flows might be far from obvious, so that identifying them requires iterating the map together with the people pursuing these purposes. This will reveal how their individual pursuits combined help move the enterprise forward in its ambition.
Purposes in the two sectors clearly reflect the steps of our Core Story:
On top, there’s a focus on everyday goals such as comfortable travel experiences, recovering from any unexpected issues and ensuring continuous service operations.
As we move down to the last step in our story, we see a shift towards more long term thinking: learning from customer experiences as they happen, and using this knowledge to collaboratively uncover opportunities and come up with new ideas.
To execute this, stated purposes shift to building future systems. Approaching the end of the Core Story cycle, ecosystem collaboration and technical competencies come into focus, to make such ideas happen in the upcoming cycle.
With more and more purposes across sectors, start adding other Outcome elements from the other facets - they provide the context for purposes being pursued and realised along the story.
In order to realise any purpose, they need to translated into capabilities as part of a working enterprise architecture: what needs to be done in order to pursue them.
These capabilities ultimately have an impact on people’s experiences, expressed as the role our enterprise plays in their journeys, and the tasks it helps them accomplish.
Mapping this context shows the realisation of purposes into concrete organisational and operational assets, and their impact on people’s experiences, in the example below on passengers using Intersection Railways' services.
By exploring the map sector by sector, your co-creators can see how priority purposes change as the enterprise moves through the steps of your Core Story. Achieving excellence in a particular purpose in the beginning can enable success much later in the story, realised by people “far away” from the original point of interest, for example passenger comfort depending on building trusted partnerships, such as 3rd party facilities and services available.
Similarly, someone’s successful realisation of a specific purpose might depend on how well the enterprise as a whole realises enabling universal purposes expressed at the bottom of the map. These purposes are disconnected from the scenario of influence, to express that they apply “everywhere” on the map, in every moment of the Core Story.
How to prioritise, position and connect purposes on your map? As you build your web of intertwined purposes, position items related to realising each step of your Core Story. Similar to other mapping strategies outlined before, there is no absolute “correct” position. But where a purpose sits will communicate at what point in time in the Core Story consciously pursuing it becomes a priority for design considerations. If your map communicates this effectively and people can relate, then you have found the right placement.
As your map becomes more crowded over time, many co-creators and dealing with different challenges, you might find a need to consolidate multiple items into higher-level, more strategic and long term purposes, covering more people and how they realise their ambition together.
Balancing focus and context
When positioning elements, keep in mind the that you want the map to tell to its audiences as a subtle message. Compared to other maps and models, a Milky Way map achieves this by highlighting context and revealing implications of priorities and decisions along the elements in focus, and the main scenario it outlines.
Every Milky Way mapping journey is different and a co-creation of the people involved. Different people will come up with a different mapping, and will be able to introduce their thinking using the visualisation. This gradually introduces the map to more and more people in the organisation, and helps to achieve the goal of a shared mental model as a visual guide to the enterprise.
The sticky note depiction of EDGY is used with a clear intention: this is a co-creation to be created on a white board, together, over time, and expecting iterations or even massive changes as you progress on that journey. Adapt your map to what your peers want or need to see, and adapt your Core Story to cover everyone who needs to be part of these discussions.
The three mapping strategies outlined in this chapter give you a starting point, depending on the enterprise design facet in focus when starting out on this journey. It can make sense to keep discussions on one single facet, or even just one element for some time, before introducing the other facets as context. You might even want to add specific instances of other enterprise elements such as your assets, products, or organisational teams before exploring context, depending on the challenge you chose to tackle first with your map.
Once you decide to add other facets as context, your map becomes a translation matrix for co-creators with different backgrounds and professional languages, combining the rich vocabulary of EDGY elements and facets with the power of instant recognition that a shared geography enables.
The next chapter introduces a set of common map configurations used in the Milky Way community of practice for your inspiration, and explains how they can be used for common challenges and conversations in enterprise environments.