OKRs and Wardley maps can be combined and enable you to have benefits from both sides.
Where can specifically this combination help?
- Strategic Alignment: Using Wardley Maps to understand the strategic landscape can inform the setting of Objectives in OKRs.
- Informed Decision-Making: Wardley Maps can provide insights into where best to focus efforts and resources, which can then be translated into Key Results in OKRs.
- Complementary Tools: While OKRs help in setting and tracking goals, Wardley Maps assist in understanding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind these goals.
Using both together you can provide a comprehensive approach to strategic planning and execution, combining goal setting and progress tracking with a deep understanding of the business environment.
![](https://joapen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/image-16-1024x664.png)
Wardley Maps does not gives you any insight about how to implement or build things. In the example above, if you want a capability to be moved from point “A” to point “B”, you need to push it with actions.
How?
Here is where OKRs can support you to define the concrete objectives, key results and initiatives to move from “A” to “B”. Land the strategy into the execution is important, without it, your strategy is just a paper or an idea.
During execution we are required to have “a north” and at this perspective OKR works as the compass that enable us to navigate towards the objective.
If we pay attention to the climatic patterns and the landscape (the map) we also keep the strategic perspective of the whole and it enables us to understand that sometimes our moves does not make sense because there are (for instance) too much headwinds.
Both perspectives, well combined are useful.