UTFM
Use The F***ing Map — why maps are a crucial form of communication, and why, as a leader, you need to know how to read and make them
There is a hoary practice in tech regarding the use (or not) of existing documentation; when confronted with a question that is already covered in that documentation, the (grumpy and obscene) response is ‘read the f***ing manual’. To make this slightly safer for a work environment, it’s translated to an acronym, and we get ‘RTFM’. RTFM is at least as old as the Internet, and expresses frustration with a common tendency to ignore readily available information, and blunder about in the dark instead.
Documentation takes many forms. Traditionally, we use a mental model of a book to imagine the scope of documentation — words and often pictures, bound up in a linear document, and meant to be read as one would a book. It is this imaginary book that we are being directed towards when asked to RTFM.
Another way of thinking about the presentation of information about important things is a map. Maps are a particularly important mental model when we are trying to understand something in some context, where the thing we are focused on is related to some other things. This is even more powerful when those relationships are in some way positional — in other words, when the relationships that we’re seeking to understand are about how the various things are positioned relative to one another. Is that forest behind that hill? Or in front of it? Can we cross that river to the east? Or the west?
Many things that are important to us are in a positional relationship to one another. Some examples might include nation states and resources they are competing for, organisations and customers within a particular market, or web servers and databases.
As a form of documentation for those sorts of ‘things that aren’t geography’ things, Simon Wardley developed the eponymous Wardley Maps. Increasingly, these sort of maps are finding use in commercial and government contexts as a way to document the positional (and situational) relationships of things.
So what’s a Wardley Map? The Wikipedia entry says:
A Wardley map is a map of the structure of a business or service, mapping the components needed to serve the customer or user.
What would that look like? Here’s a worked (and fairly advanced) example, showing the relstionships of things in a telcommuncations industry context:
Wardley Maps are subtle and powerful things. Simon has written an entire book about them, freely available on Medium — the above image is taken from Chapter 19, ‘On Playing Chess’. Other resources to learn about the practice of Wardley Mapping are via the MapCamp community, as well as the work of its members, such as here.
As leaders of teams and organisations, we are often tasked with — and accept responsibility for — learning new and better ways to communicate. Wardley Maps are unquestionably one of those, and the investment you make in becoming a skillful user of them — both as a creator and a reader — will, I believe, pay off handsomely. I’m not alone in this opinion, as the growing use of these kinds of maps (and increasingly, other styles inspired by them as well) makes clear.
I’m looking forward to the day, not too far off now, when I can respond to a question with a polite smile and a simple “UTFM”.
