wardley-maps.sgit.ai / Doctrine
Doctrine, assessed — with the evidence attached
Wardley's own analogy is military: doctrine is the training of your forces — the standard techniques any unit benefits from, drilled regardless of which battle they end up in. You would not send troops into a fight to learn how to communicate. Strategy tells you where to attack; doctrine is why you are capable of attacking anything.
Strategy and mapping are context-specific. Doctrine always applies — so an organisation's ability to handle a hard problem tends to track how well it practises doctrine, before any strategy is chosen.
One distinction matters, and Wardley is explicit about it: these are principles you choose because the evidence says they are broadly useful — not immutable laws. Several writers separate doctrine, meaning chosen and evidence-based good practice, from dogma, meaning belief held past the point of questioning. Rating yourself against forty of them, as this page does, is only useful if you are willing to argue with the rating.
doctrine.wardleymaps.com and Stach's are dead, and
awesome-wardley-maps still lists them.
The obituaries → A worked example plus a public
schema is not a tool. It is the closest thing that currently exists, and it costs nothing
extra. The evidence links point back at pki.sgit.ai, because the assessment moved and the
artefacts it rests on did not.How they are organised
Roughly forty principles, grouped into six categories and sequenced into four phases of increasing maturity. The phases are the useful part: they say what to fix first. There is no point distributing decision-making before anyone agrees what the words mean.
The four phases
Click any phase to filter the forty below. The bar shows practised · partly · not practised · no basis yet.
The six categories
Where the subject actually stands
Assessed as if the pack were built as specified — so the ratings cover the design, the published record and the one shipped surface, not a running registry.
All forty
The one rule that makes a self-assessment worth publishing
Every rating names the artefact it rests on. Not a justification — a link. So a reader who disagrees with a rating has the evidence in front of them and can say so with something specific, rather than forming a general impression that the page is generous to itself.
That discipline is why this page belongs on a site whose first sentence is maps are claims, not pictures. It is the same move: state the claim, attach what it rests on, make disagreeing cheap. Q5 asks the obvious follow-on — no map in the corpus attaches evidence to a single placement, and if this is the right discipline for a doctrine rating it is hard to argue it is the wrong one for a position on the evolution axis.
Honest tensions in the assessment itself
| Tension | Note |
|---|---|
| Self-assessed | The party being rated wrote the ratings. This is the weakest kind of assessment there is, and the page says so rather than hoping you do not notice. Mitigated only by naming the artefact behind each one, which turns disagreement into something a reader can act on rather than merely feel. |
| "No basis yet" is convenient | Five doctrines are excluded because there is no organisation. That is true, and it is also the answer that flatters the subject most — treat those five as unearned rather than neutral. |
| The phase model implies a ladder | Wardley sequences the phases, and real projects practise bits of Phase III while missing bits of Phase I. This one does exactly that. |
| Forty is approximate | The canonical list is "roughly forty" and different sources group and name them slightly differently. The categories and phase placements here follow the briefing this was built from; a few placements are ours and are arguable. |
| Rating a design, not a running system | The registry is unbuilt. Doctrines about operations and flow are rated against how the project is run, which is a weaker claim than rating a service. |
| The count | The research brief that commissioned this site describes this assessment as 41 records — 15 strong, 11 partial, 6 weak, 9 no-basis. The artefact holds 40, split 17 / 12 / 6 / 5. The artefact wins; the brief's figures are a summary that drifted. Logged as N1. |
The data, as an endpoint
/doctrine/doctrine.json is served as a stable URL.
Per record: id, cat, phase, name,
what, status, us, evidence — where
evidence is a list of [label, url] pairs and status is one
of strong (Practised) · partial (Partly) · weak (Not
practised) · na (No basis yet). The file carries its own caveat,
statuses, categories and phases blocks, so it is
self-describing: you do not need this page to read it.
Fork it, replace the us and evidence fields with
your own, and you have a doctrine assessment of your own organisation in a format somebody else
can diff. That is what filling the gap looks like without building a tool.
Sources
- Doctrine — Wardley Maps glossary
- Doctrine — Learn Wardley Mapping, and Principles First, which gives the four phases
- The Value of Doctrine and Getting Started with Doctrine
- Doctrine or Dogma? — the chosen-practice against unquestioned-belief distinction
- Where the Doctrine Ends — the critique, which this page would rather link than answer
- The raw assessment data: doctrine.json
Wardley Mapping is provided courtesy of Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0. The doctrine list is his; the ratings, the evidence links and this page's framing are ours and are CC BY 4.0. Nothing here is an adaptation of his material — why that distinction is load-bearing.