The strategy step everyone skips

Most government modernization skips the step that makes strategy possible: seeing the full landscape. Programs often jump straight to action—buy the platform, stand up the pilot, adopt the framework everyone's talking about—without a shared picture of how their value chain works, what users need, or what's evolving. So they copy what worked somewhere else, defend sunk costs, and react to change instead of anticipating it. The result is less failure of effort and more like playing chess without looking at the board. In this Mission O/S Live, Rise8 Founder & CEO Bryon Kroger and VP of Enablement Adam Furtado sit down with Simon Wardley, creator of Wardley Mapping and one of the most original strategic thinkers working today, to talk about how to map your situation before you commit to action. Wardley developed his mapping method as a frustrated CEO who couldn't answer a simple question: does this strategy even make sense? The method has since become a way to expose assumptions, surface hidden dependencies, and decide where to build versus where to buy. They'll cover: Why situational awareness is what most government programs are missing How mapping a value chain exposes where to differentiate, where to commoditize, and where you're wasting money fighting the inevitable How technology evolves toward commodity, and why programs keep custom-building AI that's about to become off-the-shelf If you're tired of strategy that's really just guesswork dressed up in a slide deck, this conversation is for you.