wardley-maps.sgit.ai / Resources / Bits or pieces?
Bits or pieces? — Simon Wardley's blog
Primary source Dormant reference / primary source
What it is
The working notebook where the technique was actually developed in public. It contains the canonical short-form definitions that the book later expanded — most importantly the doctrine list (https://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/08/doctrine.html, 16 August 2016, verified) and the map cheat sheet post (https://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/04/whats-in-wardley-map-and-need-for-cheat.html, verified) which sets out the four constituent parts of a map: anchor (user need), position (visibility via chain of needs), types (activities, practices, data, knowledge), and evolution (stages I–IV measured by ubiquity vs certainty, explicitly not time-based diffusion). The evolution-axis post (https://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/03/on-mapping-and-evolution-axis.html) is where the ubiquity-vs-certainty derivation is laid out. Also carries much of the polemic that gives Wardley his reputation.
Limitations
Blogspot-hosted, poor search, no tagging discipline, images frequently low-resolution. Dormant since Feb 2024 — anything you cite from it is at least 2.5 years stale, and doctrine has since expanded to a 40-principle / 4-phase grid (see Learn Wardley Mapping below) that the blog's 10-item list predates.
The details
| Maintainer | Simon Wardley |
|---|---|
| Started | Long-running (posts date back well over a decade; the evolution-axis post is from March 2014). |
| Status, August 2026 | Effectively dormant. Most recent post verified: "A good enough map", 3 February 2024. Archive remains fully accessible. Active writing has moved to https://swardley.medium.com/ (verified — 15,000 followers, most recent post "Map Camp … and so it starts", 10 June) and to https://www.swardleymaps.com/. |
| Licence | Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 — stated on-blog: "My writings on this blog are provided as Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike." ⚠️ This is 3.0, not 4.0. Do not conflate with the book's licence. |
| Home | https://blog.gardeviance.org/ |
| Best single link | https://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/04/whats-in-wardley-map-and-need-for-cheat.html |
Verified 2026-08-23 — status, licence and links checked against the source on that date. The site re-checks every URL it publishes on a schedule and publishes the run, successes and failures alike.
Attribution. "Simon Wardley, Bits or pieces?, CC BY-SA 3.0." ShareAlike applies. Because 3.0 and 4.0 are not identical, keep blog-derived and book-derived material separately attributed rather than merging under one notice.