Collectively map your current environment and then change things to make what you would like to have happen more likely.
- A departure from typical approaches to strategy
- High-level overview
- Talk to us about running a session
- Resources
A departure from typical approaches to strategy
Estuarine Mapping helps you manage the evolutionary potential of the present. It’s a counterpoint to the common approach called “backcasting”, where we define a target state and aim to close the gap. I wrote about some of the problems with backcasting for JP Castlin’s newsletter: Then & Now. If those issues sound familiar and you’re ready for a change, come join us in the estuary!
High-level overview
Imagine if your leadership team could walk into a room and emerge after two half days of workshops with a crisp portfolio of actionable and effective micro-projects for your teams to start working on.
Those attending won’t need to align on a vision, nor will they duke it out until one agenda triumphs over the rest. They’ll just need a vague agreement that things aren’t as good as they’d like and that they want to do something about it.
The micro-projects that they emerge with will deliver one of the following:
- happy outcomes,
- a change in your conditions that makes happy outcomes easier or more likely, or
- increased awareness of their situation, so they can come up with even more effective micro-projects next time.
This workshop pulls people completely out of backcasting for a short while, but the outputs can easily be incorporated back into most normal business processes. This makes it excellent as a “pre-process” that generates strategic signals to help leadership teams backcast more effectively.
Talk to us about running a session
You will need a facilitator who’s experienced in this method, as it’s a non-trivial workshop to run. We can help.
If you’ve got a strategy session planned and you’re looking for something new and dazzlingly effective, grab a slot here and let’s talk about whether this method could be suitable for you: https://tidycal.com/tom.kerwin/25-minute-coffee
Resources
If you’re here from Product Quest Podcast, hi! Here are resources about Estuarine Mapping:
- Dave Snowden shared the most up-to-date version of the process on 5th March 2024: https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-st-davids-2024-estuarine-3-5/
- And the overall shape, including all the stages on 1st March 2023: https://thecynefin.co/cynefin-st-davids-2023-1-of-2/
- Here’s my summary of an experience co-facilitating the process with Dave. This was the first time all the pieces of the process came together in one continuous workshop, which was exciting. The overall shape of the method is still the same, but many of the details have evolved since I shared this account in January 2023: https://tomkerwin.substack.com/p/a-trip-into-the-estuary
- Viktor Cessan wrote up an excellent account of his experience using Estuarine Mapping and SenseMaker in a large, established organisation: https://www.viktorcessan.com/my-experiences-with-estuarine-mapping/
- For the most up-to-date instructions, here’s the wiki entry for Estuarine Framework: https://cynefin.io/wiki/Estuarine_framework
- Here’s a video presentation I made: Dropbox Link
- Podcast episodes:
Tom Kerwin and Corissa Nunn 070: Lobster dinner with a toddler | Trigger Strategy – lots of people have said this was their favourite- Tom Kerwin and Corissa Nunn 085: High on agency? | Trigger Strategy – what if you could map the Serenity Prayer?
- Tom Kerwin and Corissa Nunn 046: Enabling constraints | Trigger Strategy – people often ask for examples of constraints. Here you go!
Still got questions? Drop me an email: tom@triggerstrategy.com