Where do you land? Wardley maps run through the whole book, shown before they are named, and the first thing a reader should work out is their centre of gravity: explorer, villager or town planner

In short

• Wardley maps belong early in the book, and then everywhere. They are how I understand the landscape and the strategy.
• Show them before naming them. Let the reader feel the pattern, things moving from A to B, before learning the words.
• The four stages are not only for activities. My table has many more scales, from openness to backups to data.
• The most important question is where the reader fits. Explorer, villager or town planner.
• These are personalities, and Wardley nailed them. Better, in my experience, than the personality tests used in business.
• Everyone has a centre of gravity. Some can play at several levels; it changes over a career; it is where time flies.
• Each needs different skills, and a different learning path. All three are brilliant; they are good at different things.
• The book should carry a badge for each. Black and white, because the book will be printed that way.

Maps everywhere, shown before they are named

I think this is a book that Wardley maps need to be spread across, from start to finish, because a map is a great way to think about almost anything. You start with the user needs, you map the whole thing, and then you see that every part of it is moving: from the new, rare and badly understood, to the product, to the commodity everyone takes for granted. There is a movement pattern: this goes from A to B.

That is what gives me a kind of zen. I understand the strategy; I understand the landscape. In a talk I gave on why Wardley maps changed how I think, for the Open Security Summit, I listed the shifts mapping caused in how I think, and the eleventh was: "Wardley Maps gives me inner peace (allowed me to understand why things happen)".

So the book should show maps a lot, sometimes without even talking about Wardley maps: just the user, the need, the chain of things that serve it, and the movement. The reader gets the pattern first, the story of something moving, and the concepts and the vocabulary come later. The newsroom's article on why I love Wardley maps has the longer version.

The storyboard for this article does exactly that: it draws a map of Zara's first job without naming it, and only then puts the names on the axis.

The four stages are not only for activities

When people start with Wardley maps, I see a lot of them focusing too much on the four evolution stages most examples use: genesis, custom built, product, commodity. To be fair, that is what most of the examples Simon Wardley shows use. But I found it useful to have a much wider view of what those four stages could be, so a while back I made a table with lots of examples. The first four rows are from Simon's published materials; the rows below them are my own explorations. It is on the slide "Not just evolution" in that talk.

The point for the reader is that evolution is everywhere: in how open a piece of writing is, in how fast a team can recover, in whether an idea is accepted, in whether data is raw text or a map. Once you see it, you see it in your own work and your own career.

Where do you fit?

Then the question I most want the book to ask its reader early: where are you? Are you an explorer, a villager or a town planner? Wardley first called them pioneers, settlers and town planners, in 2015, and since 2023 explorers, villagers and town planners.

I think it is important to distinguish them, because I feel they are different personalities. In business we keep finding the same thing over and over again: Myers-Briggs, the four personalities or the twelve, whatever the test of the moment is, are variations of the same idea. I think Simon Wardley really nailed it.

And I have experienced it. Even when you build a diverse team, I really feel every individual has a centre of gravity. Some can play at several levels, some are fine in more than one, but there is a centre of gravity, and knowing it helps. The question to ask is what you care about: what makes you lose sense of time? What is the thing that, when you do it, time just flies? That is where you are.

The explorer

The explorer is somebody bursting with ideas. They love to experiment, to try things out. In fact, once it works, it gets boring, and they build on top of it. They are not just the person playing with the Lego; they are the person who wants to invent the Lego bricks, and then do something with them. They want to explore: that is the word.

Failure is exciting. Failure is just an experiment, something you learn from. That is not for everybody, because this is a person for whom change is natural; they thrive on it. And that is why the immediate connection with what you are doing, the instant feedback, matters so much to them.

What the explorer makes only works for early adopters, because it is going to break. It will be full of wires, half-baked, a prototype, very crude. But there are users who love that kind of thing, and they are the ones who live with the explorers.

The villager

The villagers are different. They love to create a process, to package something. They love the user: they are very user and customer focused, emotionally attached to the user being happy, almost the user themselves. They put themselves in the middle of the problem and try to solve it.

They thrive on productising something: releasing a product, going to market, selling, packaging, features, taking something and refining it. They do not like failure that much, because for them the product works. Often it is about trimming it down, about simplicity, which is where a lot of design comes into play. The first version just has to work. The second version has to be designed. A lot of designers are drawn to this, because it is where a huge amount of creativity is.

Every one of these is a brilliant individual; they just have a different focus. Villagers can ship, push things through, improvise to a degree, and package everything up. They are the ones who allow things to scale: without the villagers, everything would die before it reached the other side. And they have a very visible presence.

The town planner

The town planners are different again. They focus on attention to detail; they geek out; they really care about the details. A good friend of mine says boring is good, and that is them: they like the nice hum of effectiveness, the marginal gains, the scale, the bigger volumes. In fact, they like to be invisible, because they know they have done their job right when nothing goes wrong.

Their work is making something a commodity, which is still ridiculously hard. Sometimes it is about simplicity: removing things, taking things away, going back to first principles. They are the people who pay attention to the letters, the words, the dotted i's, the grammar, the code. They can spend hours and hours on one thing; that is craftsmanship, the obsession with getting it right, together with the ability to make it work. They probably do not have the same need for recognition that the product people have, which is fine. They are different personalities, in different modes.

A centre of gravity, not a box

You change over your life. As your career changes, your centre of gravity can move. But it is important to recognise where you are, now, because the skills you need as an explorer are different from the skills you need as a villager, which are different again from a town planner's. They are all brilliant, but they have different skills, and you should be learning different things. That is why the learning paths matter so much, and why figuring out the game, and where you are in it, is one of the most important things a reader can get from this book.

I would like it to be acknowledged very early on. And throughout the book I would like it to be a theme.

A badge for each, in black and white

I would like a badge, or some kind of marker, that we put on the parts of the book: this is a more explorer-leaning section, this is a more villager-leaning one, this is a more town planner-leaning one. The book will be printed in black and white, so it cannot rely on colour. The storyboards now carry a first attempt, where the shape carries the meaning: a compass for the explorer, a house for the villager, a grid for the town planner. Zara wears the compass, Priya the house, Tomás the grid.

Maybe we even group the book that way, because some topics matter more to one of them than to the others. That is just an idea; I am not sure yet.

The brief

For the editor. Read team/editor/role.md, this article and the storyboard first.

1. Record the decisions in the vault: Wardley maps run through the whole book and are shown before they are named; the reader's centre of gravity is introduced early. Done when both are decisions on the text, with my words, in the vault.
2. Give every chapter in the chapter map a centre of gravity: explorer, villager, town planner or all three. Done when the chapter map has the column, and the counts show whether the book leans one way.
3. Draft three learning paths, one per centre of gravity, through the chapters. Done when a reader who knows where they land can see what to read first.
4. Put a map in every part's storyboard, using the storyboard map kind. Done when each part shows at least one map, named or not.
5. Prepare interview questions that make me justify this: the claim that Wardley's three describe personalities better than the business tests; what my own centre of gravity is and how it has moved; an example of each from teams I have built. Done when the script is in your briefs/.

Questions for me, kept apart:

• Group the book by centre of gravity, or only mark it?
• Can my friend who says "boring is good" be named?
• Do the badges work, or should they be drawn differently?

What this does not claim

• The personality claim is my experience, not research. Personality tests such as Myers-Briggs have a contested evidence base of their own; the book should say what Wardley claims, what I have seen, and nothing more.
• A centre of gravity is a lens, not a label. People move, and many play more than one role.
• The rows below the line in the table are my explorations, not Simon Wardley's; the first four rows are his.
• The table's spellings are corrected ("Openness", "Ideology") from the slide.
• The badges are a first attempt. Drawn for the storyboards; whether a printed book uses them is to decide.

If you know which of the three you are, or think none of them fits, write to agent@riskmandate.ai.

Where this comes from

A voice memo of mine on 18 October 2026, with a screenshot of my evolution table and of a LinkedIn post of mine that shares it, written up by this site's journalist, gen-z.journalist, in my voice. The argument and the editorial responsibility are mine.

The talk is Why Wardley Maps changed how I think for the Open Security Summit, read from its public export on 18 October 2026: its first slide is dated November 2021, and my LinkedIn post refers to it as the July 2022 presentation; the table is on the slide "Not just evolution" (the fourth shift), and the quote is the eleventh shift, word for word. Simon Wardley on pioneers, settlers and town planners (March 2015) and explorers, villagers and town planners (December 2023). Related: why I love Wardley maps, explorer coding.