Milky Way Enterprise Map

Tools

Milky Way Enterprise Map

A shared map to find your way around your enterprise.

Phase: Focus | Explore | Co-Create | Invest | Realise | Sustain

Scope: Identity | Architecture | Experience

Level: Strategy | Coordination | Operational

Authors: Milan Guenther, Annika Klyver

The enterprise on a page. A Milky Way map visualises the Core Story cycle and uses it to build up the map's geography: a shared mental model that reduces complexity, makes dependencies visible, and enables a common understanding across facets and intersections.

Why and when to use

A Milky Way map shows an overview of the enterprise on a single page, as a shared mental model for all co-creators involved in its evolution. It depicts what's going on, again and again, as the enterprise performs its activity and goes after desired outcomes.

The map is based on the enterprise's Core Story: a representation of this activity in discrete steps lined up to form a recurring cycle. These steps build up a universally applicable geography and provide context for all Enterprise Elements positioned on the map.

With use and adoption, the map settles into a stable layout that makes it easy for co-creators to orient themselves and locate parts of the enterprise. People remember it, reuse it, and apply it to the many challenges they face. This cuts the time spent learning to read unfamiliar maps and models, reduces misunderstanding, and streamlines conversations and decision making. Using the map integrates different viewpoints and leads to more collaboration and better conversations.

Use a Milky Way map for:

• Holistic insight: instead of isolated views, an interconnected constellation emerges. Zooming out reveals previously invisible relationships between facets, like star systems that only become recognisable as a whole from a distance. By combining the full variety of enterprise facets and elements, we gain a holistic perspective across the full spectrum of interactions and dynamics. The enterprise's overarching story becomes tangible on the map.
• Beyond the what and how: the map goes beyond the traditional view of processes and organisational structures. It connects day-to-day operations with purpose and beliefs, and shows why capabilities, products, people's tasks and brand expressions should be the way they are. The focus is on outcomes – what we want to achieve, not merely how it is implemented. This makes the reason for the enterprise's existence visible, aligning our stars with intention.
• Transversal decision making: the map makes it easy to spot, discuss and map out the impact of a specific decision, anywhere in the enterprise. It reveals blind spots, hidden consequences and the ingredients needed to make a change happen, and gives everyone involved or affected a visual aid to evaluate and co-design it together.

How to use

1. Sketch your enterprise on a napkin
2. Chart your galaxy of enterprise elements
3. Design your map for insight and joint decision-making

Resources

The map can be built on any whiteboard or diagramming tool. A ready-to-use Miro template is available:

• Milky Way Map (Miro template)

Open the Miro template

Related tools

• Enterprise Scan: perform a scan to reveal shared understanding, or gaps to be addressed, before charting the map
• Service Blueprints: depict operations and customer interactions in more detail across one or two map segments

Stay tuned as we add more tools to EDGY, or create your own EDGY tool.

Related Patterns

Enterprise Design Patterns relevant to creating and using a Milky Way map:

• #9: Foundation of Change Portfolio: Use the map as the backdrop for positioning and prioritising change initiatives
• #16: Hint:
• #17: Tangible Presence: Keep the map visible and physically present where people work and decide
• #23: Dancing to Enterprise Rhythms: Align the map's recurring cycle with the rhythms the enterprise actually runs on
• #29: Capture Stories: Build the Core Story from the stories people tell about their work
• #30: Depicting Shared Understanding: Make the collective mental model visible in one picture
• #32: Moments in Time: Anchor elements to the steps of the cycle where they matter