Tools › Milky Way Map › Step 2 of 3
Chart your galaxy of enterprise elements
Add Enterprise Elements to your map, using one of three mapping strategies tied to the challenge at hand.
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With the first draft Milky Way sketch established and adopted, the map initially serves as a shared visual reference for collaboration and interaction: between people involved in building and running the enterprise, and those it strives to engage in its markets, such as customers or partners. As more and more people appear along the Core Story, it starts to resemble its namesake, our galaxy with its millions of stars.
Like maps of our galaxy, the Milky Way map depicts a dynamic system that is constantly in motion and only partially known or observable to the map makers. We see it from a specific vantage point: because our solar system is located inside one of its spiral arms, we simply cannot travel elsewhere to get a better overview. Similarly, a Milky Way map incorporates the perspective of its makers. We cannot include everything and everyone, and we have to decide how to label and position what the map depicts as we cover more and more space.
But even with this incomplete and approximate 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 communication, starting with the first co-creators. It grows with each new contributor, who challenges the geography to depict better what is actually going on in and around the enterprise.
To accelerate this process and get the full benefit of a shared geography, your map needs to relate to the challenges at hand, ones its co-creators can clearly relate to and have on their agenda. It is most effective when it shows what people care about as they tackle the challenges relevant to them. Ideally, you 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
Start in familiar territory
It is easier to explore areas of the enterprise close to your (or your client's) location on the map, closer to your familiar daily business. Reach out to the people next to you, clarify misconceptions and close knowledge gaps, then venture further into the neighbourhood.
Create custom views
Just as a map of a piece of land shows or hides certain elements, make multiple map views that depict relevant elements. This relates directly 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
The Milky Way map is already useful as a visual guide to the enterprise, but it shows its true power when customised to respond to a specific design challenge. Choose a widely shared change ambition or open question, and use EDGY facets and elements to decide what to show and what to hide on your map views. To clarify what users can expect to see, you can state the challenge explicitly on your map view.
Use existing knowledge
Many elements you could depict on your Milky Way map might already exist in other formats, such as capability or process maps, customer journey maps, or mission and vision storytelling. Find the documents people refer to, and build on 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 in the context of the larger enterprise. Keep technical and other details off the Milky Way map, but keep it in sync at a high level with the important models used in your enterprise. For example, reuse 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 translation between facets by adding complementary 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 add products being delivered and the customer tasks they serve. Depicting a filtered selection of additional relevant elements as context enriches conversations and improves the quality of design decisions.
Choose a mapping strategy
By giving people a navigation aid to the enterprise, the initial rough sketch of a Milky Way map is already useful by itself – but it's just a start. Different professional practices involved in enterprise change will keep using their specific tools and models, such as product roadmaps, capability or process maps, journey maps or organisational charts – and will have a hard time relating them to each other.
How do you make the Milky Way 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 overlaps and dependencies with other perspectives used within our teams. This way, the Milky Way map becomes directly relevant to the questions, elements and dynamics your audience cares about.
Over time, multiple distinct views on the same map that prove useful to your audiences and their challenges will build up the benefit of a shared geography: through familiar positioning and visual cues, people will be able to read and interpret all views of the map, which facilitates shared understanding.
To get started, review and refine the Core Story to make explicit what happens in each sector, and to clarify the background story your Milky Way map supports as a repeating cycle. Make it emotional: what does your enterprise do 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; its future comes later. If your Core Story doesn't feel completely realised or true in today's enterprise, that's okay — it illustrates the tension leading to change, which is what your map is designed to help with.
Use your napkin Milky Way map as input for a workshop with potential co-creators among the people it depicts, in particular those who are easy for you to engage and work with initially. Then move to a bigger canvas and draw the base geography. Add placeholders for the people you want to engage or consider when scouting for the 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 whiteboard 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, 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 will let you select a suitable mapping strategy. Below are three approaches to select and add EDGY elements to your Milky Way map, each corresponding to the Enterprise Design Facet in focus when starting out. 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 focuses on the way the enterprise runs and achieves its purpose, depicting what is being done as the Core Story unfolds.
To populate your map, run working sessions with the internal people on your map sketch whom you identified as relevant to your chosen challenge, either 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 the subject of Cecilia Nordén's book The Milky Way. Its main purpose is to navigate and accelerate organisational or process change, starting from the Architecture facet. This page also describes two alternative mapping strategies, starting from the Experience and Identity facets.
Ask people to describe what they do, and use blue sticky notes to add this to the map, reusing the location to relate the capabilities to 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 stops changing much with each 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 need for their work, and who uses the outputs of their work. These exchanges can be mapped as flow relationships between capabilities, depicted as arrows 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 line up to combine human and other assets to make and deliver products, and ultimately 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, even if some areas remain 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: which 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 that serves it directly.
Focus areas will shift as more and more change initiatives use the map to navigate "their" areas, naturally bridging silos between teams by depicting the operational enterprise as one story. It shows the enterprise as a story and flow across capabilities, in the 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 the people we try to engage with and serve as an enterprise, and understand their demand in their terms. In most cases, this corresponds to the customer initially in focus in the story: understanding and mapping their experience of being served by the products your enterprise makes and delivers.
As a starting point, choose one or two external people 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 the 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, the 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 repeat the cycle?
This outside-in view of the enterprise, following the customer journey, helps teams take the potential benefits created by the organisation and its products as a starting point, rather than the way it operates and collaborates internally. The Core Story and its steps provide 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:
- To come up with interesting product offerings for specific trip ideas or business travel occasions, we have to build our shared infrastructure to offer and serve relevant destinations, such as business or vacation hubs.
- As passengers start their detailed planning, we appear in their journeys with travel products made available via channels for interactions and transactions that support their tasks, such as journey planning and reservation.
Note that business passengers might not do the booking themselves, so other people could be 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 show that complexity on your Milky Way map, 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 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 is harder to determine. 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 blurs. Sometimes it makes sense to map the experience of investors, partners, suppliers or job candidates. Space on your map is limited: focus on people who influence decisions when designing the enterprise to respond to your priority challenge, and whom your map's audience is interested in.
This mapping provides the basis for adding 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.
- Which capabilities serve your customers directly? 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, between cycles.
With more and more elements added, the Milky Way map shows 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 detailed planning and research tasks the enterprise needs to address. 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 spark a conversation when setting up marketing and product management capabilities:
- How do we enable environmentally conscious customers to reduce 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 lets you challenge a limited view of 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 a 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 map depicts a story of our enterprise in action, realising a shared ambition. The third mapping strategy starts from that ambition: instead of our customers' tasks, or the capabilities needed to serve them, we initially focus on the purpose we go after as we move through the steps of our Core Story.
To get started, find out about the purposes the internal people on your napkin pursue. These can be found in content such as principles or values, vision or mission statements, goals or metrics, or elaborated co-creatively in workshops. Focus on "why they are here": what drives them as individuals and 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, co-creators might feel uneasy: is this something we pursue, something we have to do, or something we personally want to achieve? Whenever people appear on your map, these questions are valid. But this nuance makes all the difference when looking at enterprises through the different facets. As your map evolves, it becomes 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 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: purposes 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. Which purpose influences which?
As with the other mapping strategies, this is when we can focus on ambition, expressed through a more detailed web of purposes that build on each other as your Core Story unfolds. Hiding the people, we can explore how well the purposes align by themselves, and how much they reveal 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 who appear in the Core Story, aiming for medium-to-low-level purposes without getting into purely tactical performance goals. Then, by looking at the map as a whole over the course of the Core Story, we gain visibility into higher-level purposes by asking what they might achieve together. This reveals gaps between the purposes communicated and those actually being pursued by people.
The example below shows a more complete picture of how the 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 identifying them requires iterating the map together with the people pursuing these purposes. This reveals how their individual pursuits combine to move the enterprise forward in its ambition.
Purposes in the two sectors clearly reflect the steps of our Core Story:
- At the top, there's a focus on everyday goals such as comfortable travel experiences, recovering from unexpected issues, and ensuring continuous service operations.
- Moving down to the last step in our story, we see a shift towards 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 Outcome elements from the other facets – they provide the context for purposes being pursued and realised along the story:
- To realise any purpose, it needs to be translated into capabilities as part of a working enterprise architecture: what needs to be done to pursue it.
- These capabilities ultimately affect people's experiences, expressed as the role our enterprise plays in their journeys and the tasks it helps them accomplish.
Mapping this context shows how purposes are realised in 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. Excellence in a particular purpose early on 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 the third-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 the enabling, universal purposes shown at the bottom of the map. These purposes are disconnected from the flow of influence, to express that they apply "everywhere" on the map, at 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 according to the step of your Core Story they help realise. As with the other mapping strategies, there is no absolute "correct" position. But where a purpose sits communicates at which point in the Core Story consciously pursuing it becomes a priority for design considerations. If your map communicates this effectively and people can relate, you have found the right placement.
As your map becomes more crowded over time, with many co-creators dealing with different challenges, you might 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 message you want the map to convey to its audiences. Compared to other maps and models, a Milky Way map achieves this by highlighting context, and by revealing the implications of priorities and decisions around 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 different mappings, and will be able to introduce their thinking through the visualisation. This gradually introduces the map to more and more people in the organisation, and helps 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 built on a whiteboard, together, over time, 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 give you a starting point, depending on the Enterprise Design Facet in focus at the outset. It can make sense to keep discussions on a single facet, or even a single element, for some time before introducing the other facets as context. You might even 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.
Once you 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 instant recognition a shared geography enables.
The next step introduces a set of common map configurations used in the Milky Way community of practice, and explains how they can be used for common challenges and conversations in enterprise environments.
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