Tools › Milky Way Map › Step 1 of 3
Sketch your enterprise on a napkin
Start with people and a Core Story: a first rough sketch of your enterprise's geography.
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A Milky Way 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 towards 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, shared with the people around you. From there, through sharing and reuse over time, you will 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 step.
Practical tips
Start where it's easy
Your first Milky Way map will respond to a certain challenge, tackled by specific people within a certain area. Start mapping where it is easiest for the group. Depict the parts of your enterprise relevant to this challenge in the 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.
Depict the whole enterprise
To enable instant recognition and a shared spatial mental model of the enterprise, the geography should include as much of the enterprise as possible, from the start. Rather than depicting only people directly relevant to your challenge, include people considered "far away" or irrelevant. Give them a name and place them on the map as the larger context for your story.
Locate yourself on the map
Include your own (or your client's) role in the story the map is telling. Then look around you, and invite those you work with directly to place themselves. Also position people you work with indirectly, your customers, or other key actors you want 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 the story
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, add missing actors, and find the general direction of interaction and collaboration. Avoid getting lost in the details and continue the story.
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 you aren't familiar with. Some might be considered "far away" or irrelevant to 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. Make a conscious decision to give them a space, but leave out any details for now.
Tell your Core Story
To obtain a geography, there needs to be a common reference, or anchor, just like the compass pointing North on a map of a piece of land. In a Milky Way map, this anchor is your Core Story: a cyclic sequence of steps describing what your enterprise does, again and again.
At the very centre of a Milky Way map, you'll find the Core Story depicted as a circular loop broken down into a sequence of steps, with an open gap 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: what is the pulse, what is happening again and again? The story doesn't follow a specific timeline. It is a general reference of the stages your enterprise goes through.
To depict the Core Story, we line up these steps in an open circle, giving 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 production capacity.
- 🧑🤝🧑 We establish relationships with 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, reflecting organisational learning and iteration, and a moment of pause and reflection 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: to show how things work together, enable recognition, and thereby 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 maps can make sense.
Build your geography
Just as North pointing upwards is an arbitrary convention in geographical maps, the Core Story is primarily a convention, used to establish a geography for the enterprise.
Consequently, a good Core Story needs to resonate with the 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 who 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 who play roles and organise in groups, working for the enterprise. In most enterprises this corresponds to staff employed by the organisation, but it can also extend to project teams, communities of practice, or even partners playing a key role in the enterprise. Find a suitable term to label these people across the cycle, such as their team names or the 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 the 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.
- Bottom centre gap: teams that support others, between cycles or across the whole cycle.
- External actors: people your enterprise addresses and interacts with. They are usually 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 who support building up the enterprise, such as investors, candidates or suppliers.
- Top: people who benefit from or support delivering the enterprise's products. Customers are usually in focus, but your story could also include others, such as sales partners.
- Bottom right: people involved in learning from a completed cycle and preparing for the next one, such as authorities or strategic partners.
The right place for people, 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, don't hesitate to change your Core Story – 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 who aren't employed might best be mapped as internal teams. On the other hand, a single department might best be mapped as an independent enterprise, making other employees of the same legal entity external actors. 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 want to reach with your map.
When naming people on your map, make it clear who to talk to to find out more about that map area. Use labels that explain the nature of the relationship, the activities and interests. Avoid generic names or jargon your audience might find hard to understand or relate to.
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 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 iteratively and collaboratively. The map maker presents their first attempt at a geography, pointing out that it is a draft, and potentially wrong. A sketch-like "napkin" depiction, or sticky notes, help communicate this to co-creators.
Using input from many people on the map, the Core Story is gradually revised and refined, and people are repositioned 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 who enable or guide, or are otherwise involved along the entire story, are positioned in the gap at the bottom of the map.
It is no coincidence that this map is more "crowded" on the left-hand side: this focus relates to the challenge chosen to introduce the first map, which is likely to bring 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, high-level labels. Including them on the map allows the map-making team to consider the consequences of changes as the story unfolds, trace the impact of their work, and spot dependencies with people not immediately on their radar.
For example, some indicators that could directly inform design decisions, such as competitive response times to operational issues, might come from the Market Analytics team – even though these people are considered "far away" from the heart of the envisioned changes, towards the end of the story.
Press play
Compared to a classic people or stakeholder map, a Milky Way map shows the enterprise in motion. Interactions between people are therefore depicted as arrows (flow relations), following the general direction of the Core Story cycle. Mapping these flows brings the map to life and lets map users imagine how people collaborate over time as the enterprise moves through the steps of the cycle, simply by following the arrows.
Internally, flows depict collaboration between internal people: who communicates the results of their work to whom, and who depends on input from others. The story shows processes and employee journeys, and can represent direct communication, handovers, or integrations between automated systems.
Interactions with external people depict getting in touch with prospects and customers, but also with 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 explore the effect of changes on its competitive positioning.
Adding flows will undoubtedly challenge some initial positions of people on the map, making you move them to get shorter arrows. That's a good thing: it helps your map depict more accurately how people work together.
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.
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 easy to relate to for people seeing it for 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 a good number to build up your geography.
The sequence of steps can be obvious, but it can also be tricky to decide when the enterprise runs multiple largely independent operations in parallel. Remember, the goal is not a "correct" order but a compelling story: any sequence that feels natural to most map users and helps stabilise the map's geography is a good design choice. If there is no obvious order, simply choose one.
What snapshot should your Milky Way map show: past, present or a 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.
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