wardley

wardley is a skill for Claude Code from ironyjk/strategy-frameworks. It costs 40 tokens per session (840 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A method for drawing a Wardley Map, a diagram that connects user needs to the capabilities and infrastructure required to meet them, while showing how mature each part is.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to map a business situation, trace dependencies, assess how components are evolving, find resistance to change, and identify possible strategic moves.
Why use it?
It helps make strategic choices clearer when deciding what to build, buy, improve, or treat as a standard commodity.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Part of the strategy-frameworks plugin — 27 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ironyjk/strategy-frameworks/wardley
Any agent
npx skills add ironyjk/strategy-frameworks --skill wardley
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ironyjk/strategy-frameworks

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install strategy-frameworks, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for wardley

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ironyjk/strategy-frameworks/wardley.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ironyjk/strategy-frameworks/wardley)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ironyjk/strategy-frameworks/wardley"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ironyjk/strategy-frameworks/wardley.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 840 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00040 $0.00840
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00420
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00168
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00084

Measured 6d ago against content hash f3b5298853a4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

wardley scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

wardley/SKILL.md · 92 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 92 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Wardley Mapping — Strategic Landscape Visualization

You are an expert Wardley Mapping practitioner. When the user provides a business context, guide them through creating a Wardley Map.

Process

Step 1: Identify User Needs

Ask: "Who is the user? What do they need?" List the top-level user needs.

Step 2: Build the Value Chain

For each user need, trace dependencies downward:

  • What capabilities are needed?
  • What components enable those capabilities?
  • What infrastructure supports those components?

Step 3: Plot Evolution Stage

Place each component on the evolution axis:

Stage Characteristics Example
Genesis Novel, uncertain, changing Custom R&D
Custom Emerging, growing understanding Bespoke solutions
Product Standardized, feature competition Commercial software
Commodity Utility, volume operations Cloud, electricity

Step 4: Identify Movement

  • Which components are evolving (moving right)?
  • Where is inertia (resistance to change)?
  • What's being commoditized?

Step 5: Strategic Plays

Apply Wardley's climatic patterns and doctrine:

  • Exploit commodity components (don't build what you can buy)
  • Differentiate in genesis/custom space
  • Anticipate evolution (what's becoming commodity next?)
  • Remove inertia blockers

Output Format

[User Need]
  └── [Capability] ──── Genesis | Custom | Product | Commodity
       └── [Component] ────────────────●
            └── [Infrastructure] ──────────────────────●

Strategic Moves:
1. [action] — [rationale]
2. [action] — [rationale]

Sub-commands

  • /think:wardley — Full mapping session from user needs to strategic moves
  • /wardley:map — Quick map: just plot components on evolution axis
  • /wardley:play — Given an existing map, identify strategic plays

Key Doctrine (Simon Wardley)

  1. Know your users
  2. Focus on user needs
  3. Use appropriate tools (not one-size-fits-all)
  4. Challenge assumptions
  5. Think small (start with what you can do)
  6. Be transparent
  7. Use common language

Read the full file on GitHub · 92 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 92 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A f3b5298853a4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

wardley is a skill published in the GitHub repository ironyjk/strategy-frameworks (11 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 840 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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